In 2015, I got in an accident and sliced up my foot. The wound got infected, and I sent almost an entire month laying in bed, doing nothing. Since I could barely walk, exercise was completely out of the question. And with 60 days, I’d lost all my muscle mass.

Even when I’d recovered enough to walk around, I was in no condition to lift weights.

So, during this time I decided to start doing body-weight exercises. I read an article saying that you could develop a good physique off of dips, push-ups, pull-ups and leg raises. So, I dusted off my old Power Tower started doing that routine every day.

At first I’d only manage to do one or two pull-ups, but eventually I began building up my stamina and doing longer workouts.

And within three months, I completely changed the way I looked.

(December 2015 To March 2016)

My point is that you can always follow a proven path to success. With 99% of activities, someone else has already blazed the trail. And all you need to do is retrace their steps.

Whether it’s fitness, business, or some other venture, there is an existing success blueprint for you use.

And these plans are cheap.

A $20 book gives you all the tools you need to achieve your goals.

Case in point, last year my mom decided to write a couple of articles and see if she could get them published in various magazines. She bought a copy of How to Write and Sell Simple Information for Fun and Profit, followed the book’s advice, and ended up selling an article to Reader’s Digest.

Personally, I’ve done well off publishing eBooks and sales letters. Both of which I learned about from books (The Millionaire Fastlane and Web Copy That Sells, respectively).

Virtually every skill (from accounting to zoology) has books and articles written about. And, there are tons of free resources online. Between the library, YouTube, and high-quality forums, there’s no excuse for not knowing something.

I live in Asia and have even met people who learned English by watching YouTube, just so they had better job opportunities.

If somebody who grew up under the shadow of war and squalor could master a foreign language on their own, there’s no reason you can’t learn a simple skill like business or sales.

Inaction: The Reason Most People Fail

Can you really make money selling houses? Or shorting stocks? Or betting on football games?

Yeah. Tens of thousands of people have been successful at all these.

Same goes for following those “cheesy” personal finance books.

I grew up in Iowa, and there are plenty of old farmers who retired as millionaires because they consistently put $10 or $20 a day into mutual funds or other long-term investments. And over 40 or 50 years, that money gradually added up into one huge sum.

So, if there are so many proven paths to wealth, why do most people never even follow one?

Simple, it has to do with action.

Learning is always easier than doing. You can sit online and discover 500 different ways to make money, all in a single afternoon. But actually trying one and following through with it takes effort. As a result, most people quit as soon as it’s time to actually do the work.

Realistic Time Costs For A Project

(Morning To-Do List)

Since we’ve covered what not to do, let’s look at how easy business actually is. Assuming that you’ll consistently do the work, and innovate, we’ll examine what happens if you start a side business and work at it for one hour every day.

How much impact could that one hour have on your life?

Let’s take a look, using a very basic situation and some simple math:

It takes 45 – 60 minutes for you to pen a blog post or sales letter. Write one a day and you’ll end up with a pretty good stream of passive income.

At one hour a day, even a complete rookie working in a done-to-death field (like bodybuilding or dating advice), would end up with 365 different articles. That’s more than enough to build up some decent site traffic.

Throw in a few affiliate links per post (Amazon, Click Bank, etc…), and you’re easily making an extra thousand bucks a month. $12,000 a year doesn’t sound like much, but it’s the same as earning 6% interest off a $200,000 mutual fund. Plus, you’re getting paid off an hour-a-day hobby.

Doing the work and putting in a consistent effort isn’t even that difficult. It doesn’t take herculean effort to come up with one article per day, or to write between 500 and 1,000 words each morning.

Stick with it for a full year, and watch as your daily effort builds up into a sizable stream of extra revenue.