subject: Is It A Good Time To Leave Your Job And Go Fulltime With Your Internet Venture? [print this page] I found myself in a fiscal crunch the other day: I have been giving away my income quicker than I make it... I am sure I am not suffering alone with this. As soon as I figured out the bottom line I felt despair descending on me. It was mighty familiar. I have been stressed out, on and off for 60 years now. The only thing that has altered is my mindset towards my depression. I today have a little elbow room, a slight distance to look at it: I have it, it does not have me. What there is to do when one is a financial crunch is to make more money... but depression creates a special environment: your view is obstructed and all you can view is no possibility.
I compare that with being in a deep hole, an actual hole in the ground.
You are on the bottom of it and there is nothing else but dirt that towers above you. All that would be things that you can do, new sources of revenue, new actions to generate revenue, are not viewable from this place. What you need to do when you find yourself in a position like this (I know plenty of my clients know what I am saying here, so perhaps you can too?) is
1. acknowledge the situation,
2. utilize something that shifts your view. I say in a comforting tone to myself "You can do it" and after that glance around for evidence that there are some things I can do.
Let me talk to you about your eyes here: it is very essential to understand what you are able to do.
Some 14 years ago I was recommended to get eye-training from a behavioral optometrist. Most of us have no idea that we might use our eyes improperly, to our hinderance. Some phobias, like agoraphobia (anxiety of wide open spaces) or claustrophobia (fear of tight spaces) are well known, and they are all a result of an inappropriate use of the eyes. During the eye exam they discovered that in addition to being dyslexic, I also suffer from improper, fear-based eye usage: when stressed or worried, I narrow my cone of vision to very narrow. That suggests that only about a size of 3-4 feet I can see sharply and in color, the rest is in gray-scale... Anything that is in the gray occurs even more threatening, so this is a self-perpetuating condition. The exercise consisted, primarily, of flashing my eyes out to incorporate increasingly more of the surroundings in my cone of vision.
What does this have to do with you and with being in a financial trouble?
I think, likely everything. When you are in a narrow cone of vision mode, you cannot see the big picture. Everything that is shiny or promising sufficiently, looks a good enough reason to spend money, download, read, watch. Meanwhile, your main goal suffers. Earning money, selling, system, are part of the big picture, and they get no attention until the stuff comes ahead: you can't meet your expenses, etc. Another characteristic feature of this eye condition is neglecting the primary revenue, maybe even letting go of one's job, without having an similar or better source of income already working.
When the stuff hits the fan, the first instinct of the afflicted is to find a brand new, quick, foolproof source of revenue... one of those secret bullets.
Unfortunately, no matter what somebody says, expert or not guru, instant solutions don't exist. When a guru, or a non-afflicted marketer wants to make some extra income, they use 90% of their usual foundational resources, like their well-managed subscriber list, and either re-launch an older product, or launch a product new and verified to convert with that crowd, something at a very very appealing price that only takes a few hours to create. These solutions are not accessible to a newbie marketer, so the beginner marketer needs to get the well-known rule: It is too late to dig a well when you are thirsty. In my situation, rather than putting all my energies to quickly launch a new product that has never been tried, and probably will flop... my task is to put a little Tlc into my already established sources of revenue, and make some extra profits from there to fill in the gaps.
What am I trying to say?
Don't bank on your new internet marketing endeavor: it is very tough to produce rational healthy thoughts and strategies under duress. Make sure you have an alternative income source. If you must, take a job, freelance, but don't attempt to develop an internet marketing business in a week or two when you have no money to pay the bills. Let me know your thoughts and comments on this. Do you have issues comparable to "most folks" in this business? Please remark on this post below.
