Take More Risks

This post is in response to Shoemoney’s article about the Seven Deadly Sins For People Trying to Make Money Online. I stumbled across it yesterday and it really made me think, so I thought it’d be useful to write about my own sins and my thoughts about them.

I’d love to hear about your own responses to this too.

Hope

For me hope has lead to distraction in the past. I’ve become so excited about certain projects that I’ve lost focus entirely on them. Instead of writing any code I’ve been guilty of spending a lot of time simply planning and dreaming. Now there’s nothing wrong with planning if it serves to propel the project along. However my planning mainly revolved around how I planned to celebrate the success of the project, yet I’d barely written a line of code.

What the fuck? Talk about delusional!

Hope is meaningless unless you’re prepared to actualise the ideas you have. Ideas are delusions until they are realised or at the very least, mapped down on paper.

The biggest problem for me is that hope often casts the shadow of doubt when something fails. Instead of investigating WHY something didn’t work, I’d often just quit and return to scratching my balls and complaining about how retarded people are on reddit or digg for not upvoting my posts.

Envy

I’ve felt envious of other peoples success in the past which is ridiculous as the more time I spend focusing on other peoples success the less time I’ve spent working towards my own.

I’m now a firm believer that you should welcome success wherever you see it because by keeping such a positive mental attitude you’re more likely to attract success into your own life.

We’re all on our own individual paths, which is why trying to follow someone else is fucking stupid. You’ve gotta make your own mistakes and fashion your own way in the world. Reading blogs and forum posts should count for 10% max in terms of progressing. The rest must come from your own experience and that comes from trying shit out. No matter how insignificant it may seem.

Inconsistency / Laziness

When I’m working on a site I tend to pause once I’ve created 3 or 4 pages and then survey my work. This is when I become distracted and I start checking stats etcetera, thus disturbing any creative flow I originally had.

In all honesty I just haven’t worked hard enough to deserve success so I can have no complaints in that area, especially recently where I haven’t being doing any online stuff at all.

Much of my inconsistency stems from self doubt. I’m constantly over analysing things and putting my ideas down before I’ve fully worked them through. It’s good to be critical to an extent, we all need to have our bullshit detectors tuned to 10 at times, but it can impede productivity too much.

There comes a time when you must switch the inner critic off and just regain some focus on what you’re aiming towards.

This is why it’s so crucial to have goals, because then you have something to aim towards and the pull of the inner critic weakens. I’m aiming to be free of my own inner critic soon so that I can realise my aims of moving into my own apartment by the end of the year.

The idea of still living at home with my parents at the age of 25 is terrifying, which is why I’ve started blogging here again.

John Chow – the self proclaimed net mogul – has ran a personal blog over on Johnchow.com since December 2005. Whilst the site has existed for little over a year it has been phenomenally successful working it’s way into the Top 2000 websites in Technorati.

Below is a Clint Eastwoodesque review of the website which was written in response to his (rather clever) linkback offer.

The Good

• Regularly updated providing coverage of the latest affiliate programs that matter. See Agloco

• Boasts a large readership who aren’t afraid to provide their 2 cents.

• John’s manipulation of social bookmarking websites such as Digg is inspiring.

• Honest (sometimes to a fault) about his earnings and tactics.

• Consistently strong writing helps showcase his personality and sense of humor effectively (something which is missing all too often in this current era of the ghost writer).

• The Top Posts section is handy for finding his best work.

• Numerous pictures of mouthwatering food posted regularly. Now that can never be a bad thing, can it?

The Bad

• The site’s template – whilst functional and attractive – lacks a little bit of personality.
• Perhaps his personal and business posts could be separated more effectively?

The Ugly

• I would not want to push in front of him in the bar queue for obvious reasons…….