A Lesson In Business and Entrepreneurial-ism: Burn The Foul Stench of Desperation

Let’s be honest, nobody wants to live in survival mode.

It sucks.

You lose focus on your capacity to achieve, you’re distracted by bills, you have no safety net, no soft blanky to hold gently when shit hits the fan.

The stress of living in survival mode is like dating someone you don’t like.

You do it because you need to, which means you can’t piss them off, but you can’t blame them for not being likable either.. and that’s when it hits you — you’re dating yourself and the only person at fault is you.

What we don’t think about when we’re in survival mode, is that nobody is paying attention because nobody cares.

Nobody wants your half-assed offer, product, service or even your damn freebie — because you need them to take it.

See the problem yet?

They’re doing you a favor and already have that endorphin hit of ‘I did something good in the world today’ without taking any further action than accepting whatever you’ve pitched.

People know what it’s like to be desperate because everyone has been there.

They know the bad decisions you’ll make.

They know that you’ll do anything to close them.

You’re asking someone to gamble on you when you seek them in times of desperation.

Unless they’re certain of your capacity and potential when you’re out of desperation mode, you’re enabling yourself to be rejected.

The best advice I received in 2017, think rich — be rich.

I’m not selling the dream here and this isn’t just about money. But the fact is we are a species that thrive on being attracted to what works, what grows and what creates success. That’s how we mastered being the top of the food chain — and within our own triangle, resides a twisted form of natural selection:

nobody who can help you, will follow you down the path to nowhere if you yourself don’t have the vision to be uplifted.

10 days ago, I left my job of nearly 3 years at Freelancer.com as the Head of Partnerships and Marketing of the Warrior Forum.. crazy right?

I had a cozy job, neat table, free beer, traveled across the world, met a girl who changed my life and I was surrounded by the best (and sometimes the smartest) people in the industry..

..no seriously, if you were employed by Freelancer, you did something right in your past life.

So what made me leave all of the fame, money, power and ‘stability’ behind?

Well to be honest with you, initially I was being offered a position elsewhere. And man, it had everything you could ever want in your career.

It ticked the checklist of self accomplishment.

It fed your ego with a fancy title.

It gave you the feeling of fellowship and growth even when nothing was happening in front of you.

It gave you fame, money, power.

It awoke a newfound fictional self-perceived dominance that only hustlers like Harvey Specter (#WWHD) or Jordan Belfort had the balls to pull off.

But what it didn’t provide was the satiety of building something. To be neck-deep swimming in waves of self-filth and mud to rip something you crafted from scratch — powerful enough that would change the world.

Like I said, crazy right? Every entrepreneur is. How do you know you’re entrepreneurial for certain?

Do you speak in Buzzwords?
Follow trendy “growth hacks”?
Subscribed to 100 podcasts, listening to 30 seconds of each and pretending to know what the fuck they’re on about?
Wear a shirt with your brand name on it?
Did the free courses on codecademy on how to code? (no offense, they are actually a great freebie learning center).

If you said yes to all of the above, please stop reading now.

All of the above does not define you as an entrepreneur.

Even collectively, if you truly believe they do, you haven’t even scratched the surface of what it means and you’re actually just pissing the rest of us off, and nobody is going to want a shallow-minded entity anywhere near their thriving business. Period.

So what can you do? How do you burn that wretched smell of desperation?

The answer is simple: start by enabling yourself to be empowered by your strongest cards in your deck of life.

Let’s work it out, get a pen and paper and write this shit down in two columns:

• What do you know? (Existing knowledge, skills, talents, abilities)
• Who do you know? (In your network, outside your network, wisdom of influencers)

Now think, how can you leverage the two to help you get started, grow or push you in the right direction? What combination can you try?

Write it down in the columns, and when you get to combining them, grab a red pen and start drawing the connecting lines. Once you’ve drawn your connections add a third and fourth column in:

• What do I need
• What do I want

The answers are always similar, but it’s never the same. Examples:

You need a car, but you want a Porsche.

You need $1000 to pay off your bills, but you want $3000 because it would be nice to have for the holidays.

You need to learn about making friends, but you want to have them even if you’re a terrible person.

You need 2 clients to get your business running, but you want 20 so you can retire on a beach in Puerto Rico sipping on a Long Island.

Now hold your piece of paper up and tell me: do you know what you want? and secondly, do you know what you need?

Tell me yes to both, because if you’ve done this simple exercise correctly — you are no longer desperate.

You no longer need to think about your direction, because you have that on paper.

Congratulations here’s your Porsche:

You can tell me what you want now, and whether that’s the Porsche, the cash, the friends or the Long Island on the beach, we both know what you want can be achieved if you follow the directions of your needs.

So knowing what you need, and understanding what you want isn’t instant: it’s time to take action. Burn the stench of desperation.

Exhale the bullshit, inhale the good shit.

Stop staring at your strongest cards and start playing them on the table. Your cards are inflammable.

Your skills, your talent, your knowledge — nobody can take these away from you; they will not burn no matter how many times you throw them on the burning table.

At the end of the year, by the time you’ve gone through your list — roll it up and light it up.

I’ve just started my epic journey of building a digital web agency after over 10 years working for somebody else. I’m super excited and this perpetual success engine is not stopping anytime soon because I’m behind the wheel.

I’ve closed $7,000+ worth of clients this past week alone with a ‘need’ identified as $3,000. My now pivoted personal challenge is to get to $30,000+ months in less than 6 months.

Achievable? Ab-so-fucking-lute-ly.

I’m building my own wants based on understanding what I’ve needed. I’m fabricating my dream to reality, and not being hired to create somebody else’s.

All achieved by committed actions on a leap of faith, knowing my shit, playing my strongest cards, tearing down a bridge, suffering through every bad moment, celebrating every good moment — and finally burning the stench of desperation.

#letshustle

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