“I am a slow walker, but I never walk back.”

– Abraham Lincoln

How to measure your progress in life

We’re approaching the New Year and everyone wants to take action. “I’m going to lose 30 pounds!” “I’m going to learn French!” “I’m going to save money!”

People want change and they want it fast.

But sudden action won’t really do anything for you. Losing 30 pounds in 30 days might sound like a great goal, but it’s going to leave you burnt out and bitter. It’s the same as when guys say, “I’m going to take $20 and turn it into a million dollars next year.”

Great. Having goals is nice, but things don’t happen that quickly.

No one does anything notable with one afternoon’s worth of effort.

What a skinny guy can two with two years of improvement

Here’s a picture of me hiking in Nicaragua during June of 2012:

That shirt I’m wearing is a small and it’s still too big for me. I am a naturally skinny guy.

I started lifting weights six months later. There was no noticeable change when I started. No miracle bulking, 60 pounds of lean muscle in 60 days, or anything else. I just looked like a skinny guy.

Had I based my goals on short-term gains, I would have been disappointed. But I didn’t. Every week my only goal was to add a little more weight. Lifting the bar was a struggle initially. But eventually moving 315 pounds became easy.

In about two years I went from being a twig to developing some muscle.

At the gym my only expectation was to do a little better than I had done before. If you’ve never lifted putting 600 pounds on the squat rack is going to kill you. Trying to compare yourself to a professional bodybuilder or athlete leads to disappointment. Saying, “I’m going to lift five more pounds tomorrow is a more realistic goal.”

How I went from making $19,200 a year to being location independent

I used to make $400 a week putting pants on the shelves of a clothing store for rednecks. That pencils out to less than $20,000 a year.

Where I grew up having an office job at the cubicle farm would be considered a luxury. Kids grow up dreaming of becoming a middle manager at some corporation in Des Moines. If that’s success you can imagine what everything else is like.

While I did fall for my fair share of get rich quick schemes, my main business goal was to try and make a little bit more money than I had during the previous day. If I earned $1.00 off the Internet on Monday, I’d try to make $1.25 on Tuesday. Within a year I was making more of freelance writing and blogging than I had at my 9 to 5 job.

If things go according to plan, I’ll have set foot on almost every continent before turning 22.

What have you learned?

Having a goal and a plan is nice. But don’t try to be too hard on yourself. Strive for incremental success. James Altucher calls this the “1% rule.” Try and get 1% better at something every single day.

If you want to write a book don’t try to pump the whole thing out in one sitting. Write 2,000 words a day until you meet you goal. Same with lifting or making money. Trying to spend five hours in the gym once a week is less productive than going every day for 45 minutes. Making 15 one page websites in an afternoon won’t do as much as building one site for a year.

Progress is slow. It takes month, or even years, before you can actually hit your mark. Don’t try to rush things. Pace yourself and aim for a little growth each day. It will take you farther than any massive work binge could.

“Only in our dreams are we free. The rest of the time we need wages.”

– Terry Pratchett

Why most people never make more than $9 an hour

I have a client who pays me almost $300 for an afternoon’s worth of work. Whenever I finish working for them, they throw in a bonus. It’s great and I love helping on their projects.

However, they generally only have one task a month. This means that I have to find other sources of income too. And whenever I go on sites like oDesk it amazes me at how cheap some of the clients are.

The other afternoon I saw a guy offering $10 for a 3,000 word eBook. You could write your own title and make more than that.

While that kind of money is insanely low, a lot of guys don’t realize that working for $10 an hour isn’t much better. A man working for low-wages gets burnt out after a few days.

Your passion goes from a fun activity to something you dread.

Do you really want to spend 40 hours a week doing menial tasks?

Would you rather work less and make more?

I thought so.

From my own personal experience I’ve discovered three common issues that trap people in the world of low-wages.

Problem one: You work for the wrong people

I have never heard of anyone who enjoyed working for a miser. If you work for someone who cuts corners to save money don’t be surprised when they throw you under the bus.

The worst bosses that I’ve ever had were the cheapest. It wasn’t the pay that made them unpleasant (I do pro bono work all the time), it was their mindset.

Cheap people are dialed into the world of scarcity.

A lot of super frugal employers never even do well. They’re afraid of taking risks and usually end up with a lot of low-quality ventures. Tightwad Internet marketers often end up making pennies a month because they’re so concerned about spending as little as possible.

Look at the guys working 100 hour work weeks as they try to squeeze every cent out of their terrible products. Cranking out plagiarized eBooks that sell less than 300 copies, and pumping out generic content that nets $1.60 a month.

Your returns are tied to your investment. Put nothing in, get nothing out.

Problem two: You fear your potential

A lot of people are terrified of failure. They’ll talk themselves out of any opportunity for advancement.

If you read a lot of self-help books it’s easy to forget this. But, from what I’ve noticed, the vast majority of the population is scared to pursue their goals.

I get messages and emails all the time from guys who tell me “I’d do [some activity], but I don’t have enough [education/experience/free time].”

Additionally, there are millions of men who meekly give up on their dreams.

If you want to get different results you can’t keep doing the same thing. Innovate or stagnate.

Problem three: You are lazy

Sometimes the problem is you. I know that no one wants to hear this, but its true. If you’re phoning it in and coasting, don’t be surprised when no one offers you the opportunity to advance.

The people who tend to complain the most about their misfortune and bad situation are usually the ones who do nothing about it. They’re the folks who want the entire world to change around their needs, without having to actually do something themselves.

Before you blame leftists, capitalists, women, or men, go look in the mirror and hold yourself accountable.

The easy solution

Here’s a quick little cheat sheet on how to earn more and be happier. It takes all of 30 seconds to read, but has changed my entire life:

1. Don’t associate with losers.

As the old saying goes, “Show me your friends. I will show you your future.” When you work for broke employers with frugal mindsets, don’t be surprised with your meager pay.

2. Set a goal and follow through.

Compromise is futile. The only thing that you get from giving up is a sense of failure and self-loathing. I’ve quit on my dreams multiple times. And it’s never went well.

3. Do something.

Sitting around and waiting for the universe to throw you a freebie isn’t too effective. If you’re depressed or unhappy, make a change. Blaming others might be fun as a short-term stress release, but it has no lasting effect.

“Oh, you hate your job? Why didn’t you say so? There’s a support group for that. It’s called EVERYBODY, and they meet at the bar.”

– Drew Carey

Hating work does not make you an entrepreneur

Earlier today I read a post by Wall Street Playboys about online income being a futile pursuit. And I actually agree. The idea that you spend 30 minutes a day goofing off online and then wake up to 9 million dollars is stupid.

I’ve been doing Internet stuff since I was 19 and it took years before I started to do well.

People looking for a quick buck need not apply.

Working for yourself is infinitely harder than clocking 40 hours a week at most desk jobs.

However, going to school and aiming for the field that makes you the most money won’t guarantee success either.

In Iowa there are law offices sandwiched between grocery stores and hair salons. And I’ve seen investment companies sitting next to coffee shops.

Helping old ladies pick penny stocks isn’t Goldman Sachs.

There is no such thing as a “hot” field if you’re lazy

Entering a lucrative field doesn’t absolve you from hard work.

Schools are filled with guys who scrape by, fail to network, and make horrible choices. Anyone who graduates with a 3.0 and no connections to people in their field is going to struggle.

I was talking with someone who was complaining about the lack of opportunities their marking major had provided them with. No companies were hiring and they were now stuck with a low-paying retail job.

“Every local company has terrible ads. They’re sloppy and amateur. Why don’t you go around and offer to help them? There’s nothing to lose,” I suggested.

My advice fell on deaf ears.

Sitting around and waiting for some magical job opening doesn’t work. Whether you majored in English or Engineering, being average isn’t enough.

The “10,000 hours” rule is a lie

I like playing basketball. And I’m terrible at it. I’m not a natural athlete and still struggle with a lot of the fundamentals.

If I invested 10,000 hours into basketball I’d still suck at it. There’s no way on Earth that I’d be playing professionally.

Sometimes you just aren’t good enough to do something for a living.

That might go against a lot of self-help stuff, but its true. 10,000 hours of singing, playing basketball, skateboarding, or swimming would not be enough. I could spend every waking hour of my life playing sports and a talented high school athlete would still be able to beat me.

“Throw a ball through a hoop and get paid 20 million dollars” sounds simple until you actually try it.

The same goes for being an entrepreneur or professional blogger.

Yes, anyone can learn to make a website just like anyone can learn to shoot a basketball. But only a handful of people will ever make money at either. Quitting your job to start a blog about picking up girls might sound fun, but it isn’t a good idea.

Don’t gamble

I didn’t leave my job until my online earnings exceeded my 9-to-5 salary. It wasn’t hard to do, since I was only making $10 an hour, but I still played it safe.

That doesn’t make for a dramatic story, but it was the smart thing to do. As the old saying goes, “don’t gamble if you can’t afford to lose.”

Big risks don’t make you an entrepreneur. They make you an idiot.

Bill Gates is one of America’s most famous college drop-outs. He left school after finding a solution to a previously unsolved math problem and starting a handful of businesses (like Traf-O-Data).

While starting a new venture is always risky, it wasn’t like Gates left school to try his hand at something he had no experience with.

Quitting something because it’s hard is a lot different than quitting something because you have a better option.

You need experience (and lots of it) before you can succeed

People sometimes email me to ask for advice about their men’s blogs. It’s not uncommon for them to say something like:

“I’m trying to be original but Mike and Victor have already written about everything that guys are interested in.”

Here’s the thing, those two didn’t click the “Help” button in Microsoft Word and have Clippy write all their content.

Both those guys had years of life experience, conversations, and great books that inspired them. They didn’t read one bestseller a year, look at two blog posts, and then whip up awesome content.

Sitting in a vacuum won’t do anything to help you. Cloning Tim Ferriss doesn’t help either. Guys who want to do something need to get their hands dirty.

Any business, whether online or not, needs an experienced leader to make it work. Deciding to strike out on your own without learning how to make money first will leave you very disappointed.

You need to be building something and learning in the field before you can just uproot and walk out on your job.

Five thing you need to learn before quitting work

1. How to sell
2. How to leverage a failure
3. How to sit still and work for hours on end
4. How to incrementally improve
5. How to think for yourself

1. Sales

If you can’t sell you’re severely handicapping yourself.

My lifting coach has trophies and used to travel around the country competing. He’s met every bodybuilder and power lifter from the early 90’s. That alone should be enough to turn his gym into a massive success. Getting lifting advice from a guy who’s hung out with Sylvester Stallone is something that no one else in Iowa can offer.

Yet he struggles to compete against the chubby YMCA owner.

Why?

Because the YMCA guy offers a better price and cost is the only selling point my coach tries to use. I didn’t even know he’d won all kinds of events until he brought it up one time.

Lots of great products get marketed horribly. Take some time and learn how to sell something. One unique feature, that’s marketed correctly, will put you ahead of all your competition.

2. Leveraging failure

There’s a 100% chance that you’ll suffer some kind of “world ending failure.”

My review writing business was doing great until Amazon suspended my posting abilities.

Instead of whining, I got up and tried something new. It paid even better.

At some point you will face a barrier that forces you to change courses. Learn to take advantage of this.

3. Getting work done

Most people’s work consists of browsing Facebook and chatting around the water cooler.

That’s great when someone else is footing the bill, but it costs money as an entrepreneur.

If you can’t stay put until the end of a task, you won’t get very far. No one is going to give you extensions and a lot of clients are sticklers about deadlines.

Most failures, in general, are the result of laziness. Students fail classes because they don’t do the work, employees get fired for phoning it in one too many times. And businesses close their doors because they didn’t hustle.

4. Incremental improvement

Sometimes guys email me to say, “I made $10 online. How can I turn this into $50,000 by the end of the month?” While that is enthusiastic, it’s probably unlikely. Try turning $10 into a $100. It’s easier to do.

If you looked at all my ventures, the monthly earnings have increased in a non-dramatic way. My last six bank statements all went up, but there was no massive spike in profits. Taking a tiny success and making it a little bigger takes less effort than turning small success into a massive one.

Learning how to grow over time and be patient is an under-appreciated skill that most people never develop.

5. Thinking critically

If anybody who doesn’t know what they’re talking about gives you advice, roll your eyes. Dozens of people, who are not self-employed, have shared their “wisdom” (that they got from Tim Ferriss or Time Magazine) with me.

These people have never owned a business, and some of them haven’t even had a job, yet they somehow know everything.

Only listen to suggestions from people who are doing better than you. And use those as guidelines rather than gospel. Gary Halbert, my copywriting role model, could sell snow to Eskimos. But a lot of his ideas involving Internet business were awful (in one of his articles he claimed that selling things online would never catch on).

He’s great to study for his salesmanship, but there are other aspects that weren’t always accurate.

Everyone has weaknesses, don’t take all your advice from one source.

Final word

This post ended up being three times longer than I’d intended it to be (at almost 1,500 words). That’s why I’m going to keep the conclusion as brief as I can.

• If you’re only aspiration is to “make easy money,” entrepreneurship is not for you. Try and get a promotion at work instead.
• You need to enjoy working if you want to make any money in your chosen field. Mediocre effort yields mediocre money. Being a lawyer or accountant doesn’t automatically ensure wealth. There are plenty of unambitious lawyers and accountants who are working in offices next to the mall.
• Gambling is stupid. Especially if you can’t afford to lose. Finding a guaranteed way to expand slightly is better than betting on a slim chance. The Hail Mary pass is something NFL players use in desperation. If it was reliable they won’t use it as a final option.
• Most people who strike out into a new field already have experience to back their venture. Bill Gates already knew about business and computers before he quit school. Don’t go into something unprepared and expect to win.
• Learn how to sell, find opportunities in defeat, get your work done, grow, and think for yourself. Those five skills will take you farther than most “quick tricks” and “lifehacks.”

 

“Vices respectively fall short of or exceed what is right in both passions and actions, while virtue both finds and chooses that which is intermediate.”

– Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

The high cost of saving money

Living within your means is good.

Being a cheapskate who obsesses over saving money is not.

Being frugal won’t get you anything. That’s literal too. Saving money limits your options and forces you to work with a very finite amount of cash. Making money, on the other hand, gives you unlimited freedom. There’s no limit to what you earn, but there are very strict parameters for how much you can save.

Yet most people will focus solely on cutting costs. They’ll spend 10 hours looking for coupons online and 10 seconds thinking about ways to earn more.

You can only save so much

You have $2,000. You don’t go out to eat, ride a bicycle everywhere, and refuse splurge on two-ply toilet paper. At the end of the month you “saved” an extra $500.

Now imagine that you took all the time spent cooking Spaghetti-O’s, peddling your Schwinn, and haggling at the grocery store and invested it into yourself. You found a way to monetize a hobby or make some extra cash. Maybe you spent an hour a night on a project that netted $15 a day.

At the end of the month you’d have made an extra $500 and have the potential to grow your business even further.

Guy A has a $52,000 a year job. He focused on saving money and finding “deals.” Unless he gets a raise he’ll still be making $52,000 next year.

Guy B has the same job but focused on making more money. Let’s say that he made an extra $12,000 and has potential to double his business next year. Now he’ll be at $76,000.

One of these men increased their wealth while the other did nothing to improve himself.

Cutting costs is a racket

Go look up those “World’s Richest Men” articles. Ignore the dudes who inherited their wealth and focus on self-made men. How many of them got rich by working for someone else while they cut coupons and spent hours looking for free gift cards.

Here’s a hint: Zero.

They started companies and created value.

Look at all those early retirement guys and extreme frugality gurus. They might be cheap, but that’s no where the money’s coming from. Their eBooks, DVDs, seminars, and other products are what makes them money.

Early retirement bloggers are con men. They’re still working (blogs don’t write themselves) and still running a business (selling books, advertisements, and other stuff).

They might have saved money to reach that point, but it wasn’t enough to sustain them forever. By their definition I would count as “retired” since I don’t have a traditional job.

My grandparents are retired, they play golf and go on trips. That’s what people who are actually retired do. They relax and stop working.

Being a retiree who spends 40+ hours working on a business is like being a vegetarian who eats meat.

Acquiring wealth requires you to go on the offensive. You have to actually make more money. Cutting coupons or eliminating needless purchases isn’t terrible, but it should never be your main focus.

Learning how to earn more will be far more beneficial than worrying about the price difference between two brands of frozen peas.

“If you wish to get rich, save what you get. A fool can earn money; but it takes a wise man to save and dispose of it to his own advantage.”

– Brigham Young

Basic personal finance for men

A lot of men, especially guys in their twenties, have a hard time managing money. They live paycheck-to-paycheck and are constantly going broke.

And these aren’t morons either. I personally know two aerospace engineers and a PhD who are all up to their eyeballs in debt. Men who are a million times smarter than me still have trouble balancing their budget.

Due to this very serious issue, I’ve decided to start a weekly series on personal finance.  Today’s post is all about saving money. It’s a simple concept that a lot of men completely ignore until they’re buried in debt.

Develop a budget

Fiscal responsibility is one of the least sexy topics out there. Having a limit on your spending is what keeps you from buying luxury cars, ordering $40,000 watches, and taking vacations every single weekend. But it also keeps you from running your credit into the toilet and ruining your future.

One of the biggest misconceptions about budgeting is that it’s only for nerds and poor people. There are plenty of guys with decent incomes who scoff at the idea of balancing a checkbook.

In reality everyone needs to manage their money. If a guy makes $100,000 a year but buys a $40,000 C-Class and pops bottles every weekend he’ll be dead broke within six months.

It doesn’t take much to burn through several million dollars in just a few short years. Just ask MC Hammer or Evander Holyfield.

You don’t want to end up in a situation like this. But you probably don’t want to spend your weekends pouring over excel spreadsheets either. As a result, I’ve listed three good budgeting strategies that have all worked for me in the past.

• The T-Pain plan

Believe it or not, rapper/signer T-Pain (the man behind such classics as “Take Your Shirt Off” and “Reverse Cowgirl”) has a really good strategy for saving money. Whenever he earns anything he puts half his paycheck into savings.

(T-Pain discusses his savings plan at 1:43)

This works really well if you’re making tons of money without any major input costs.

Personally, I use this method whenever I have a big writing project. If you get $300 for one day of work, bank half of it. You’re still saving a ton of cash, but you also have a lot of room for fun.

Anyone with a side business or hobby might want to apply this rule. It’s awesome for entrepreneurs and people are overpaid, but wage slaves probably can’t do anything this extreme.

• The 15-25% plan

When I had a job I made $400 a week. Between transportation and food there wasn’t a lot of leftover money. Saving 50% of my income was out of the question.

At the time I’d put away roughly 25% of my earnings. This wasn’t terribly difficult and it was better than nothing.

At the very least you should be trying to bank between 15 and 25% of your income. This way you have some kind of cushion if things go badly. Getting laid-off or having your car breakdown isn’t as big of an issue when you’ve got backup money.

•  The “everything extra” plan

This is the budget that everyone hates. You stay in on weekends, buy nothing, and don’t go out to eat. It’s the image that most people automatically think of when they hear the phrase “saving money.”

But it actually works surprisingly well.

I wouldn’t recommend adopting this method as a lifestyle choice, but it is something worth trying out at least once.

Right now I’m visiting my parents in Iowa, I came back before Thanksgiving to save $1,000 on rent and $300 on airfare, and am currently using this budgeting plan.

There’s really nothing for me to do in Iowa anyway, so I decided to focus on saving, and making, as much money as possible before I leave the country again.

Learn how to make money

If you can learn how to make money you’ll never go broke.

Dedicate some of your free time to developing a secondary stream of income. Learning how to make an extra $1,000 a month will eliminate a lot of stress in your life.

Additionally, having a side business can keep you afloat if times get tough.

There are a million ways to make money. Go to the library, pick up some books, and figure out a good side hustle. It doesn’t have to be fancy, but it should make enough for you to survive on if you had to.

$1,200 a month breaks down to exactly $40 a day. You can easily come up with a business that earns that.

Every young man should develop at least one secondary source of income. A service business, rental property, website, there are numerous options.

Curtail the credit cards

There’s a lot of debt about the merits of credit cards. A lot of guys love the perks like free flights and cash-back. Other people preach about the evils of charging purchases.

While cards can be great, if you use them wisely, most men shouldn’t be playing with them. If any of the following applies to you, try and minimize your reliance on credit cards:

1. In debt from student loans
2. Inexperienced with budgeting
3. Inexperienced with business (entrepreneurs only)

Paying the government and MasterCard, missing a payment, and banking on a bad idea are all recipes for disaster. Guys who are established and know how to manage their finances can play around with cards. Young men should master the basics of personal finance before they worry about getting a free plane ticket.

Just the beginning…

Saving money is the most basic financial advice there is. It can be summed up in six words: “don’t spend more than you earn.”

But it’s still a huge problem for a lot of people. Most folks lack the self-discipline to watch their statements.

Before you start digging deeper into the world of personal finance you need to have your accounts in order.

Next week we’ll talk about the number one pitfall that most guys go into debt over. And it’s something you’ve all fallen for in the past…