2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

James Thomas
The Startup
Published in
6 min readApr 13, 2018

It’s Day 2 of my 30 Days Of Medium challenge.

In case you missed the other entries, here they are:

0. 30 Days Of Medium

1. What do you need to build your own website? — 30 Days Of Medium

2. How to find a business you love — 30 Days Of Medium

3. How to build your own website — 30 Days Of Medium

4. How to measure your website’s performance — 30 Days Of Medium

5. How to get more customers by answering their questions -30 Days Of Medium

6. The successful business website cheat sheet — 30 Days Of Medium

7. How to measure success — 30 Days Of Medium

8. Understanding the Online Sales Funnel — 30 Days Of Medium

9. What is traffic and why is it important? — 30 Days Of Medium

10. What is Google URL Builder and why should you use it? — 30 Days Of Medium

11. Double your traffic by automating your social media schedule — 30 Days Of Medium

12. How to tell what sells — 30 Days Of Medium

13. How I grew my Medium following 6,500% — 30 Days Of Medium

14. How you look at things matters — 30 Days Of Medium

15. How to SELL services to small businesses — 30 Days Of Medium

16. How to win more deals with effective proposals — 30 Days Of Medium

17. How to setup an online store in 10 minutes — 30 Days Of Medium

18. How to work from anywhere — 30 Days Of Medium

19. Why your website is sabotaging your sales — 30 Days Of Medium

20. Where does your traffic come from? — 30 Days Of Medium

21. How to actually recognise burnout — 30 Days Of Medium

22. How to hack your schedule and get twice as much done — 30 Days Of Medium

23. Don’t copy your competitors — 30 Days Of Medium

24. How to SEO optimise a blog post — 30 Days Of Medium

25. Be unique or be forgotten — 30 Days Of Medium

26. Going with your gut — 30 Days Of Medium

27. People don’t pay for average — 30 Days Of Medium

28. How to do keyword research — 30 Days Of Medium

29. Why The Pareto Principle is the world’s biggest hack — 30 Days Of Medium

30. Your content is more profitable than your telephone — 30 Days Of Medium

It’s time to find a business you love.

A business you’ll jump out of bed for everyday.

Don’t follow your passion

This video from Mark Cuban really sums it up:

If you’re not able to become one of the best at what you do, it’s not the best use of your time.

You have to be great at what you love to make a living from it

I used to love League of Legends. I sunk way too many hours into the game, constantly trying to become good enough to make a living playing it.

At a certain point, as much as it pained me to, I had to admit to myself that I kind of sucked at it. The highest rank I ever achieved was Gold 5. Which is on the upper end of average, in terms of skill at the game.

I tried for years in my spare time to do better, but it never happened.

Those players with a real affinity for the game picked it up and managed to attain high ranks within a season or two (over about a 12 month period).

I played it on and off for like 5 years. Until I quit for good. I realised it was nothing but a time suck, and it was making me unhappy because I wasn’t good at it, and we always want to feel like we’re good at whatever we spend a lot of time on.

I realised that no matter how much I liked the game and wanted to make a living from it, it was never going to happen.

What’s your why?

I’ve always been interested in technology. I used to get excited reading about the wave of tech startups I’d see on publications like Entrepreneur.com 6 years ago.

I decided I want to build one. I was only 20 at the time, and I didn’t really put any thought into why.

If I had been more introspective and self confident at the time I would have asked myself what do I actually want, and not just jumped on the bandwagon and followed the advice of others.

The answer would have been. I want to be financially independent, do my own thing, and be happy.

Forcing myself into thinking I had to try and build a tech company, or any kind of company, was totally wrong.

I didn’t know how to code at the time so I settled on the first idea that seemed viable with no barriers to entry, which was starting a social media company. I forced myself into getting a small office, hiring a small team and trying to grow quickly.

I was impatient and wanted it all and I wanted it now. Unsurprisingly, I didn’t enjoy any of it which is why I decided to make a change after 2 years and head out on my own.

Try lots of stuff

It wasn’t until I started trying lots of different ideas that I started to make any progress, as far as my life goals are concerned.

Some ideas I had would fizzle out in hours.

Others I’d feel a lightning bolt of excitement, jot it down on paper determined to pursue it the next day, only to look at it in the cold light of day and think — nah.

I eventually came back full circle to my love of technology and all things nerdy when I discovered WordPress.

I built my first website using WordPress and was hooked. I loved the CMS, I loved the page builders, I loved watching how my pages would change using the preview tool, I loved all of it.

But there were lots of things I didn’t understand behind the scenes, that I wanted to know.

I picked up learning to code again and started learning HTML, CSS, Javascript, bits of PHP and Bootstrap, and anything I could get my hands on.

Where before I was just trying to learn to code, for learning to code’s sake, I was now learning to code to get better at my business.

Suddenly it wasn’t a chore, and I wasn’t demotivated.

Each small bit of knowledge I picked up, or new task I learned, directly impacted my bottom line and made me feel great when I applied that to help my customers.

I’d finally connected the dots and found a business I loved.

Connect the dots and find a business you love

I’d be interested to hear your own a-ha moments, and how you found the business you love so let me know in the comments.

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James Thomas
The Startup

Owner of squareinternet.co. Writing about how to build, grow and scale a business online.