Anybody can run ads and say anything online. Today more than ever, it’s important to be discerning about what these self-proclaimed “gurus” are recommending.
If it sounds too good to be true, it always is.
Some of the greatest mistakes that I’ve made in my life were when I thought an opportunity or idea had no downside and no opportunity cost. It sounded great, so I had to invest. What happened next? I lost all my money.
Now I know that if there’s only upside, there’s no downside, it looks easy, and it happens fast — just keep scrolling.
If you ask anyone who has actually built a sustainable, really successful organization about their journey, they will tell you:
There was a season in my life when I was working seven days a week, 100+ hours a week, nonstop. I put myself in an environment where I didn’t have distractions. It required a lot of risk and investment. I didn’t have payoff for a really long time. I experienced failure after failure. People screwed me over. I lost out on deals. I kept at it, and eventually I got there.
That’s what it is. It’s really hard.
But it’s not impossible.
It’s more possible when you’re not constantly distracted by all the nonsense and trying to find all the shortcuts.
It’s like going to the gym and someone saying to you, “You want these abs, right? You don’t have to worry about a caloric deficit. Take this pill. Rub this cream on your stomach. I did this easy thing and I dropped five pounds in one week.”
But the next week they got it all back.
Why did that happen? Probably because it was all water. That pill was a diuretic, so just the water weight was gone. But they didn’t make any actual lasting change.
Maybe they popped some Ozempic and lost some weight because it made them not want to eat. But then what happens? They get off this stuff and they get it all back.
Why?
Because they didn’t make any lifestyle changes. They didn’t learn about proper ways to eat: nutrition and tracking calories and macros. Maybe the exercise wasn’t there to support it. There wasn’t actually that “health-style” approach.
They just took the shortcut.
My point with this is that from my experience, it is much easier to sleep at night when you don’t take the shortcuts and you actually build the foundation the right way.
If you do take the shortcuts, one day you will be exposed — and it will be on a day that you do not expect, and then everything will fall like a house of cards.
It’s the little things. It’s the little paper cuts that will destroy your business.
If you don’t want to have that real imposter syndrome, take the stairs. There is no elevator to success — stairs only.
