Why You Will Fail – The Employee Mindset
Why do most people fail at starting their own businesses or creating “muses” as Tim Ferriss would call them? It’s not work ethic or lack of ideas or intelligence. As many others have written before, the problem comes from within.
The reason you fail is because you are going into your new venture with the mindset of an employee.
That is to say, you believe that you do work, so you should get paid. I’m sorry to say it, but that is not how the world works. Sure, in an office, you can find some dark cubicle in the corner to hide in and dink around on Facebook for eight hours and get paid for a day’s work. But that’s not how things really work when you’re starting up your own business. You don’t get paid in the real world just for showing up and eeking out the minimum amount of work at the last minute just to cover your ass and keep your job.
If you go in expecting to get paid for doing work, then you will absolutely fail. You see, no one really cares if you can do work. They care if you can create value. That’s the secret.
The only way you will succeed is if you go in believing that you will get paid for creating value.
I have learned this from personal experience. The past few months have not brought much financial gain. I put in the time, but I didn’t make much money. At first I found this very frustrating.
When you’re working for someone else you get used to getting paid every two weeks (or twice a month, or whatever). You can sit on your ass talking to your co-workers about football for several hours a week, play solitaire or minesweeper on your computer, and tell everyone on Facebook that you are currently “tired” and the payroll gods will probably grant you a nice paycheck for $1500-$2000 dollars.
Ever since I graduated from ASU in May I’ve worked 40+ hours a week and I’ve only made about $400 in revenue (this does not count expenses like hosting and domains). This fact has frustrated me. I went in with the mindset of an employee. After about two weeks I started to feel uneasy that I wasn’t somehow making at least $1500 bi-weekly.
It is a strange and frightening feeling to think that your actions are responsible for how much you earn. You can’t just keep a desk warm and pull in a living wage.
I believe this is why most people fail at internet marketing or product creation.
Sure, half-assing it may get you by when you’re working for a company and you’re just trying to run out the clock. But if you half-ass it on your business, you just won’t get paid. Kind of sucks. That means you actually need to do all the boring, tedious work (unless you can afford to outsource), and you have to do it the right way.
Another symptom of the employee mindset is that people are just used to blindly following orders from their supervisors. Again, they get paid in most cases no matter if a project succeeds or fails. Thus they take this thought process into making their own products and marketing them online.
They don’t bother to do market research to find out if anyone even wants the product they are making before they waste all the time in making it. It’s madness when you think about it. But it’s all conditioned into us by the idea of being paid a salary or wage regardless of the quality of the work we do.
Don’t expect to make a fortune just because you “worked hard” and created a social networking site for bald men if you didn’t even bother to do any initial research to determine if bald men even want a special networking site just for them.
Last summer I worked at an office and had to do work that was very strongly in opposition with my values. As a result, I only did the bare minimum of work that was necessary. The rest of the time I just spent reading articles on Wikipedia (since that was one of the few websites that wasn’t blocked). There was no incentive for me to really try to do my job. I also felt that by doing my job I was hurting local communities and economies by helping to build Walmarts and other big box stores. So I didn’t bother breaking a sweat. I just did the minimum amount I needed to by the deadlines I was given.
You can’t do this if you’re trying to strike out on your own. This is the kiss of death. Don’t write a horribly written, garbage article and wonder why none of the editors on the article directory sites will accept it, get frustrated, and say “article marketing doesn’t work!” You have to put in the time and effort make sure you do things the right way. Because out here, if you don’t do something properly, you won’t just get written up or chewed out by your boss, you flat-out won’t get paid.
And lastly, keep in mind that if your goal is passive income, then you really need to understand the dark side of separating what you do from how much you earn. Yes, it seems cool to sit on your ass playing XBox all day and make a few hundred dollars. But there is a flip side to all this too. In the beginning you’ll have to do a lot of work, and guess what? You won’t see a single cent for any of the work for weeks or months.
But wait! That’s not fair! Yes it is. It’s exactly what you asked for. You wanted to separate what you did with your time from how you make money. Remember? Get used to it and push through the initial pain. Things will get better down the road.
So, if you are just getting started on some kind of business, remind yourself that you’re not an employee anymore. If you want to bring home any cash from your efforts, you have to take the time to make sure you are offering value that someone is actually interested in. And please, don’t just expect to get paid because you “worked hard.”
December 2nd, 2009 at 3:57 pm
Great post Clayton. I agree 100% and I’ve been there myself. Sometimes I still am.
If like me, you still have a full time job and you’re building your business at night it can be hard to switch from one mindset to the other. That’s why I advocate trying to work part time – say 3 days a week- if you can because it gives you 2 full normal working days to build your business during normal working hours.
It’s a lot easier to get down to the tasks needing done during normal working hours.
Well I better get back to it . . . I have to build some one-way links to my social network for bald men “Baldbook”
December 3rd, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Thought provoking article. I bet if you flip this around and take on the entrepreneurial spirit at work, one could be more successful in a corporate environment. Working hard, working smart, and taking personal responsibility are beneficial in either case.
December 8th, 2009 at 12:39 am
“Baldbook” That’s pretty cool. I wonder if that domain is taken yet?
I guess I’m lucky in that I can’t land a job to save my life (thanks to my masters degree in a contracting field), so I have more than enough time to work on building an affiliate empire.
December 8th, 2009 at 12:40 am
Interesting idea, Eric. I’ll have to keep that in mind for a future post.