An Email Players subscriber (not sure she wants me revealing her name) checks in:
Something that jumps out at me:
When you were in burnout, you wanted the 10-minute workday. When you came out of burnout, you wanted to work more.
I’m deep in burnout right now and feeling overwhelmed. But I’ve been sending my daily emails for almost a year now, and it feels like I’m cracking my way into a new level. The revenue still isn’t there but I’m trying new things.
This email gives me hope that I won’t always feel this way, that things will get easier at some point, something will click, and and I will be ready to contribute MORE instead of wanting to get by on LESS. I hate wanting to be smaller.
No question, just a THANKS for the (unintentional?) encouragement to keep going.
That is exactly how it works.
And this is what 99% never understand or experience because they quit too early.
In my experience:
Whatever someone is going after, if they have a good plan to follow, it will happen eventually. That’s literally how the process works: There’s nothing, nothing, nothing happening… wheels spinning… you wonder what’s the point… until you’re on the verge of just saying to hell with it all… but you keep going even though any rational person would probably quit (it helps to have someone who is a naysayer to prove wrong…) and then seemingly out of nowhere:
BAM!
Something happens and everything changes.
What will happen?
Who knows?
I’ve never heard or seen it be the same for any two people. But the common theme is, an opportunity arises seemingly out of nowhere while, in reality, you’ve been readying yourself to see and exploit it. An old dead deal revives. An idea comes to you out of the blue that changes everything. You get on someone’s radar who mails their list about you somewhere and 2000+ people join your email list, many becoming buyers, and many of those buyers leading to new deals, JV’s, clients, whatever it is.
It’s impossible to say what for any specific business.
But all the above happened to me and more all at once it seemed.
In fact, there was a time many yeas ago I was on the verge of saying screw it all.
Nothing seemed to work sustainably.
All my hard work seemed to be for nothing.
And I was wasting my talents on skills, with nothing to show for it, constantly clawing away, working like a mule, and getting screwed over, or making stupid decisions, or just toiling away in frustration not knowing what to do next.
(This was before I took email and list building seriously, which too me far too long to start doing…)
But then a deal emerged I thought was long dead.
A client came out of the woodworks I never expected.
I got an idea to implement out of the blue.
And then I got on some radars of the right people — who had seen some of the stuff I’d been toiling away on but that I didn’t think anyone saw — who helped put a lot of people on my list, including people wanting to hire me.
Money came in that let me invest in programs that made my skills sharper.
Which led to more profits.
And more skill mastery.
Which then led to another series of opportunities, deals, clients, etc.
And all of those then had “threads” I tugged on, that led to more opportunity.
Until, today, it’s not a matter of where good deals or ideas are, but which to turn down.
And so on, and so forth.
I didn’t “engineer” any of it.
I simply created an environment for it to happen and grow in organically, and went with it.
Had I known then what I do now I’d have both created the environment & engineered it.
But the point is this:
Any one of a million “things” can happen.
And every single person I know in this business has had some “thing” like that happen at some point. A catalyst that sparked a fuse, that created a chain reaction of events and opportunities that changed their entire lives seemingly “overnight” after many years of hard grind and struggle.
Admittedly:
It’s hard to see it or believe it when you’re in the thick of darkness & despair and nothing is working. But if you were to ask people you know who are successful at what they do, I suspect they’d tell you the same thing. And it’s like that law of physics where for every action there is a reaction.
With no action, there can be no reaction.
So it goes to reason that you should not focus on the reaction, but the action.
As many actions as you can.
Eventually there’ll be a reaction.
There has to be – because, as the late Earl Nightingale astutely said:
That’s the law.
Ain’t nothing metaphysical or “woo-woo” about it either.
The thing is though, nothing to aim your actions at it’s almost as bad as having no action. A ship without a rudder will get to some destination, probably something destructive… (deserted island, shoals, storms, hit an iceberg or another ship…) so it’s foolish to try to approach it like The Secret or whatever.
Thus, having a plan.
Doing the work, with a plan, is what separates the sheep from the goats.
That plan may change and evolve, but it’s a start.
As far as how to use this info?
I can’t make your plan for you.
But my Email Players Newsletter might serve a a good beacon.
You’ll have to decide for yourself.
More info here:
Ben Settle
