Blind
Ambition
by Morgana Braveraven
Shhhhh… listen.
Can you hear it? It’s the sound of Jim Bob Stevens tossing in the
towel. It’s the sound of P. Jenny Hofflemeyervanderboogle dropping her
brand new, $2500 laptop off the bridge, into the river. It’s the
sound of Darcy Smigfluff, and her sister Margaret, giving up with a
heavy sigh (and a sniffle, and a few tears, even though they are
trying desperately to fight them back) because they’ve invested so
much time, effort, and money into this home based business thing and
this crap just doesn’t work!
It’s the sound of
defeat. The sting of defeat. Why do we hear it so often
in this industry?
Hmmmm – let me
think… It’s not because people aren’t working hard enough – heaven
knows they are sending out enough spam to sink the Titanic (I know
this for certain, because three quarters of it ends up in my inbox…).
It’s not because they lack enthusiasm (the friendly spammers that land
in my inbox are exceptionally excited – and why wouldn’t they be? They
have found the be-all, end-all program! They are going to retire next
week!!!! Now that is exciting!). It’s not because they don’t
invest in quality business tools and advertising, and there is
certainly a plethora of good programs out there – good heavens, people
are spending a fortune! And yet, three weeks later – you can’t find
these folks. They have fallen off the planet. They’ve given up. What’s
going on?
Let me just draw
from the Allegory of the Unfinished House to see if we just
can’t get to the bottom of this little mystery.
Hal and Josephine
want to build their dream home. They find some plans that they love in
a magazine. They send off a big fat cheque for the plans, and when the
plans arrive in the mail they are very excited! Finally, they will
build their dream home! They have the plans. They have purchased a
building lot. And though they have never even built a garden shed, let
alone a house, they have plenty of drive and ambition. One day, as
they are looking over the plans, Hal says to Josephine, “Joe, I’ve
decided that I am not going to use any nails when I build this house.
I hate banging on nails, and I hate the noise. Bang, bang, bang, bang,
bang – I Hate it! Oh, and another thing – I’m gonna start by building
the living room first and work my way out from there…”
Three months
later, there sat on the building lot, a pile of lumber, a bunch of
wire, and a few windows. Hal had built a lean-to in the centre of the
lot, and lashed it together with some rope. Josephine had laid some
garden boxes outside the lean-to, and planted some marigolds to
brighten the place up a bit… Six months later, Hal told Josephine that
he hated building, that the plans were useless, and the whole thing
just wasn’t going to work out. A week later they sold the lot to a
builder.
Remind you of
anything? Looks like a case of Blind Ambition to me. So often people
come to me with so much excitement that they can barely contain
themselves. They have found a business that they feel they can really
sink their teeth into – they are in love with the product, they sign
up at the platinum level, sinking $600 US into a business package.
And, throwing good money after bad, they sign up for with a zillion
marketing tools. Sadly though, their ambition will be sunk all too
soon, and what will sink them is not the product or company, not the
tools they subscribe to – what will really sink them is that they have
no idea what they are doing. When it comes to marketing online
and running a business, the people who seem to be most drawn to the
industry are those who are keen to make a change in their lives, keen
to take control of their financial security – they have a very strong
sense of why they want to run a business on the internet and
they bring a ton of ambition to the table, but they are absolutely
blind as to what it takes to build a successful online business.
They jump
onboard, thinking the internet is the be-all, end-all solution to
their situation (which it can be if you know what you are doing). They
send out 10,000 email ads a day, then sit back with their wallets open
expecting the cash to start flowing straight out of their pc monitors,
and three weeks later when they have barely made sixty-five bucks,
they jump out of their chair, stomp their feet, fling papers wildly
across the floor, and curse the entire industry and everyone involved
in it. Shortly thereafter, they pack it in. Honestly, the way I see
most people attempting to build a business on the internet are about
as effective as trying to build a house with a spoon and a pair of
nail clippers …
Question: If you
opened a bakery would you dump hundreds of dollars a week into stock
and advertising, and then pack it in when you hadn’t made enough cash
to retire within three months?
I don’t think so.
What you would probably do, if you were a realistic sort of person, is
go out and learn all you could about the industry – you’d learn how to
bake, how to attract customers – in fact, you might even hire a
consultant to help you find your way through the start-up process. And
in this industry you should do no less. If you are really serious
about making a success of your online business, you’re going to have
to learn how to make your business a success. Fortunately,
there are a number of great ways to do this.
~ Read. Read,
read, and read some more. There’s a lot of great information on the
internet, and a good deal of it is available at no charge to you. Go
out and read some articles written by credible, successful
individuals, and when you come across articles that you really
resonate with, see if the author offers any courses that might suit
your needs. Then go out and make their teachings a part of your daily
and weekly activities by applying what you learn to your
business. A word of caution: it’s a great idea to learn from a couple
of different people, in fact, it’s a great idea to pick up tips and
tricks from all kinds of people. However, it’s a really bad idea to
become so info-dependant that all you do all day is read training
material and neglect to apply any of it to your business. Your
business will never flourish through osmosis. Knowledge is fantastic –
but you have to do something with it!
~ Find a
mentor. Find someone with whom you click and who knows how to run an
online business successfully, learn their techniques and apply them
consistently to your daily business practice. Again, if you’re not
applying your new found knowledge to your business, you are wasting
your time (and that of your mentor). It’s one thing to have
information – it’s another to use it. So get out there and shake what
your mentor gave you!
~ Follow a
leader. Common sense will tell you that it is a good idea to find
someone who is already a success and follow them. Don’t just sign on
with someone because they happened to be the person who introduced you
to a product and business that appeals to you. You do have a choice.
Yes, you want a great product/opportunity to work with – but that is
only half the battle. You want a competent, capable individual to help
you get off the ground. So, ask yourself a question – if the person
making the presentation has little or less experience than you do, how
will that benefit your efforts at building a business? If that person
doesn’t have the expertise that is required, you had better be certain
that they are attached at the hip to a strong leader or team that can
provide you with all the guidance that you will need to bring your
business to the level of success that you are seeking. Find a leader,
or someone involved with a strong leadership team, and duplicate
what that individual or team is doing. Common sense – follow a leader,
especially if you don’t have a clue about running a business of your
own.
Ambition is great
– Blind Ambition is tragic. So take all that excitement and energy and
funnel it into your business in a positive way. If you don’t know how
to get a business up and running, that is not a problem. It becomes a
problem if you fail to admit to yourself that you don’t know how to
make it all work, and the result isn’t pretty. If you don’t know what
you are doing, all of your effort will become nothing more than a dull
grey smudge on the internet highway. You didn’t start your own
business to become a marketing statistic – so learn what you need to,
and apply that knowledge to your business every day.
Until next time,
Morgana Braveraven
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Morgana Here
