How to make your own luck
Filed under: Announcements, Inspiration & motivation, Online biz
A little over a year ago, this business I have today — and any “name” I have now, and infamy, and whatever — didn’t exist. Given that, the fact that this little blogging experiment has led me to a six-figure business and exposure on some of the biggest sites in our own little corner of the Net is something I’m pretty proud of.
But there’s a problem. Let me explain.
My first big break — the first time a decent number of people began to see me in my quasi-developed form — was when I first started writing for IttyBiz, as Naomi’s little experiment. (If you don’t know that story, here’s where it was announced back in early 2009.) That went well, and it was the springboard for a lot of things… like growing an audience, finding a wider customer base, and opening the door to write for Copyblogger. All of that has been fantastic.
You might look back to my IttyBiz debut and say, “If the IttyBiz thing hadn’t happened, we wouldn’t know Johnny B. Truant.”
And then a lot of people will go a bit farther and say, “It’s good that you had the advantage of being on IttyBiz, because a lot of people don’t get an opportunity like that.”
And then a few people just stop beating around the bush entirely and say, “It sure is lucky that you had Naomi stumping for you, or you’d be nowhere.”
I’ve gotten that sentiment in various forms over the past year, and now, right here, I’m going to give my official answer to that statement, and here it is:
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
I could get defensive at this point, but I’m not going to. Instead, I’m going to try and be helpful because frankly, anyone who thinks that luck had anything at all to do with it is punching him- or herself in the metaphorical testicles right now.
If you think I got lucky, then you’ve already chosen to lose in life. If you think it truly is all about luck, then you’re totally screwed because luck isn’t within your control. After all, I got lucky, and unless you get lucky, you’ll never have any success — just like I wouldn’t have had any success if I hadn’t gotten lucky.
Sound about right? We’re all victims, subject to the whims and winds of the universe, helpless to control our destinies?
Fuck that. Here’s how things really work.
How I got lucky with my first big writing gig
The first sizable writing job I got was with a big human resources magazine. My first time working with the magazine, I got $1200 to write a feature – great shakes for a kid who had barely been paid to write before. And check out this stroke of luck: I got that job because my dad knew a guy who knew a guy who was a magazine editor.
I ended up writing over 60 articles for that magazine. And every once in a while, I’d think what some people think about the IttyBiz thing. I wouldn’t give myself any credit. I’d think, “Wow, I have a really great thing going here. Most people don’t get to do this. Most people don’t get to work from home and do something creative for a living.” And on the heels of that: “It sure is lucky I knew Tom, because a lot of people don’t have a connection at a magazine to get them a great gig like this.”
But that’s not how it was. Yes, I had a connection. But that connection would have been useless if I hadn’t been doing the right thing in advance of the opportunity, hadn’t recognized the connection, and hadn’t known the right way to address it.
Tom wouldn’t have referred me to the editor if he hadn’t thought I’d do a good job.
The editor wouldn’t have given me the assignment if he hadn’t checked me out and agreed that I’d do a good job.
If I had turned in a crap article, the magazine would have axed it and would have paid me only the kill fee, and then never hired me again.
And if I had been a shitty writer, shitty businessperson, shitty corespondent, generally shitty guy, or shitty anything else, they wouldn’t have used me over 60 times after that.
Connections and opportunities open doors… but it’s up to you to find the doors, and then to walk confidently through them.
How I got lucky with IttyBiz
The assumption that “I had Naomi to help me” falls apart once you realize that she and I didn’t have any idea who each other was 15 months ago. She wasn’t my drinking buddy. She didn’t owe me a favor. I was one of thousands of readers, one of the hundred pitches and requests she gets every month. If you think she plucked me up randomly to give me a guest spot for the hell of it, you’re wrong.
Pitching my idea wasn’t easy. I had to fight for it. I had to make her an offer she couldn’t refuse. I had to do it in the right way, because she’s easy to creep out. I had to do it at the right time, with the right amount of persistence, through the right vehicles. I had to make her believe that it would benefit her greatly, and I had to do it in a way that wasn’t bullshitty or hypey. I’ve gotten to know Naomi fairly well by now, and I know that people kiss her ass like you wouldn’t believe. There’s a thousand things constantly competing for her attention. Inertia — ignoring me — was very easily the default.
Once I was on her blog, I had to win over her readers. Nobody was forcing them to read my posts. Nobody was forcing them to follow my links, to take me up on my offers. And even if they were just kind of doing what she tacitly seemed to be suggesting (by having me there in the first place), nobody forced people to refer me down the road. Nobody forced people to buy from me when I raised my prices months later. Nobody twisted Brian Clark’s or Darren Rowse’s arm to force them to run my posts on their blogs.
I know this sounds like chest-beating, and I’m quite certain it’s pissing some people off. But look, you have to stop believing in luck. You have to stop believing that success stories start with the Good Old Boy network handing down favors to people who would fall on their faces otherwise. If you believe that, you’re totally and completely fucked.
I’ve only been “lucky” in business for a year, folks. If anyone thinks I’m patting myself on the back for my consistently great choices, then you don’t have the full picture.
Consider:
• I took a job in a lab just out of college, an hour away from my house, for $12k per year. My job was counting fruit flies and having severe panic attacks about it.
• I got comfortable in my old freelance job working for only three clients, and then did nothing as they folded one by one, and didn’t so much as attend one event to try to find new clients.
• I borrowed over a million dollars and sunk it into hideously inadvisable, highly overleveraged real estate in bad neighborhoods, then watched in horror as the market collapsed.
All of those things were completely my fault. I was not unlucky. I was negligent. I was where I didn’t want to be each time — and it was totally, one hundred percent my own doing.
The flip side of that is that if I’m going to take responsibility for the stupid things I’ve done, I SURE AS FUCK am going to take responsibility for my successes.
How to make your own luck
I’m about to tell you that you should pick up my new course with Lee Stranahan, called Question the Rules: The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have. So if that bothers you, stop reading — because I want you to buy it, and am not going to pretend even one tiny bit that I don’t.
Folks, I don’t bullshit. If I were into hawking crap, I’d be selling a formula that will make you rich overnight. I wouldn’t write articles about how AdSense arbitrage is stupid and how the magic ingredient is “persistence.” I wouldn’t tell all of my clients that “it may take a long time, and you’ll have to be patient.”
When Lee and I started talking about creating a course, he had to convince me that we could do it in a way that I would believe. I would not promise that you could quit your job in X months. I would not promise that if you followed a certain set of steps, you’d be able to achieve X spectacular result.
So believe me when I say that Question the Rules will help you. It will not make you a millionaire overnight or make all of your dreams magically come true. But it will help you.
It’s based on the idea that you’re different, or you wouldn’t be trying to do your own thing. If you were “normal,” you’d be doing what normal people do… and getting what normal people get out of life. And as a person who is different — who is a rule-questioner, who is, as we affectionately say, “punk rock” — you need guidance that won’t straightjacket you. You need to know how to operate outside of the norm. And because it’s pointless to give you the blueprints for our lives, we wanted to be able to teach you how to draw the blueprint for your own.
Question the Rules is based on the idea that everyone has connections. Everyone has an in. Everyone has opportunities, or can create them. Everyone can find the right people to help them. Remember, I didn’t have Naomi to help me. I found Naomi and was able to make it compelling for her to help me. Lee interviewed director Kevin Smith as Kevin’s house, writes for the Huffington Post, and wrote, directed, and produced an independent movie. Lee didn’t know Kevin Smith, Arianna Huffington, or his film’s sponsors. He found those contacts. He worked to cultivate those contacts.
We can help you make your own luck.
This post isn’t a disguised sales pitch. This post is a sales pitch. I want you to buy Question the Rules, because doing so benefits you and me both, like any successful connection in the real world.
The price goes up at the end of this week, from $97 to $397. It won’t ever be $97 again.
Here’s the link to Question the Rules. After you’ve gone through it and applied what you’ve learned, come back and tell us how lucky you’ve become. Lee and I are both sincerely dying to hear it.
How to Question the Rules
NOTE: There’s a video below. If you’re reading this post via RSS, Facebook, or email, you may not be able to see it… in which case you should click through to the post on my blog.
I recorded this video post because I’m feeling far too lazy to spend several hours right now to write a post. Besides, I’ve never truly done a video post before. So — okay, this is about me being an innovator, then. Yeah. Forget the “lazy” thing.
Anyway, check it out. I talk about what it really means to be a DIY, rule-questioning entrepreneur, and why you need to watch your ass if you actually want to be successful at it instead of just being a broke-ass punk.
When you’re done, check out the new site for our course, Question the Rules: The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have. That’s going to kick a metric ton of ass, and it launches April 28th. Be sure to sign up so that you can get it early and get it cheap.
(Oh, and you’ll get a bonus interview just from signing up that might just kick your biz into high gear. Go get it now.)
So, here’s the video:
All entrepreneurs are punk rock
Back in 1995, I bleached my hair so blonde that it became translucent, because I thought that’s what you did when you were into punk rock music.
When you use off-the-shelf products to do this, you can’t get like Clairol Light and Easy or whatever; you need the two-stage salon hardcore stuff. And if you don’t like the effects the first time (like in the above photo), you maybe do it twice the second time, ill-advisedly and counter to directions, until your hair shimmers like a Twilight vampire and your mother good-naturedly looks at you in that way that suggests that she doesn’t have any idea what the fuck you’re doing and has stopped trying to figure it out.
So I was blonde. And I sprayed my hair so that it stuck straight up, and wore badass sunglasses. And sometimes, I’d go to four punk shows in a week. In cities as far as three hours away. Yes. I was that awesome.
Around this time, mainstream internet was starting to gain momentum (people talked about “maybe getting some of that email thing or whatever”) and I was in college, which meant that I spent a lot of time on alt-dot newsgroups looking up low-bandwidth porn and other low-bandwidth low-browery, like the stuff my roommate enjoyed from alt.tasteless. And of course, I spent a fair amount of time reading the righteous discussion on alt.punk.
Surprisingly, the folks on alt.punk were somewhat rigid about the rules that defined punk rock. If you worked in the mainstream, you weren’t punk rock. If you were over 30, it seemed unlikely that you could be very punk. If you watched The Price is Right, you were not punk. If you clubbed seals at the Republican National Convention while smoking cigars lit with hundred-dollar bills while schmoozing senators who had plans to take over the world, somehow that made you less than punk.
One poster on alt.punk said that he used to skate every day and go to see the Descendants, but now he was a 32-year-old dentist who skated on the weekends and listened to the Descendants on his office CD player. He said it was possible to be punk as a dentist. When nobody agreed with him, I figured it was time to stop reading alt.punk.
It suddenly seemed to me that one of the least punk rock things in the world was to establish rules for who was punk and who was not.
And while bleaching my hair was fun, it suddenly felt like the least punk rock thing I could be doing, if my reason for it was “because it felt like the punk thing to do.”
And I realized that it’s not what you do that makes you punk rock. It’s your reasons for doing what you do. If your friends like Rush and you like Samiam and you listen to Samiam, you’re punk. If your friends like Samiam and you like Rush and you listen to Rush, you’re punk. If, on the other hand, you listen to Samiam because it seems like the punk thing to do, you’re just an asshole poseur.
Punk rock isn’t about breaking rules. It’s about questioning rules. You keep the rules that feel like they serve and fit you. You break the ones that don’t work.
Punk rock isn’t about being a rebel. It’s about being conscious enough to look at everything in your life and ask if it makes sense, or if there’s a better way to do it, regardless of how popular that better alternative may be.
Punk rock, when you get right down to it, is about being making choices consciously. It’s about not living by default.
You — yes, YOU — are punk as hell
I’ve mentioned a few times now that I’m co-creating a new course with Lee Stranahan. It was supposed to debut on my birthday, on March 23. But the project kept growing and growing and getting so damn cool that we gave ourselves another month or so to let the project be what it seemed to want to be. So now it’ll launch at the end of April.
And although it’s still officially unnamed, we’re thinking of it as Punk Rock Entrepreneurship, or maybe the slightly less abrasive Nonconformist Entrepreneurship.
Because one of the things you have to understand when you’re building or running your own business is that you’re a screaming hardcore punk bastard whether you know it or not.
You’re the punkest motherfucker I ever did see; hell, you’re even more punk than me.
(A virtual high-five to anyone who gets the reference I just made. In reality, you’re probably not more punk than me. I had translucent hair, remember?)
I’m going to take a wild guess that some of you don’t currently self-identify as being punk, so let me explain why I think you are, you rebel:
• Despite what “most people” do in getting a job, you have either started your own thing or are trying to do so, which is totally giving the finger to the normal way of doing things.
• You have an idea that is kind of out there (sell hot dogs across the Net; consult virtually on dog training) and are determined to do it no matter how wacky it may seem to others.
• People in your life have probably told you that your idea is stupid, or risky, or ridiculous, or else they’ve accepted it with an indulgent, patronizing nod, “knowing” you’ll fail but not wanting to break it to you. But — and here’s the thing — you’re doing it anyway.
• In line with the true punk rock DIY ethic, you’re forging out on your own and are “doing it yourself,” running mainly on instinct and guts.
• Punk rock was the genre that realized, “Hey, we can form a band first and learn to play later.” In the same way, I’ll bet there are things about your business that you still don’t know how to do, but you started anyway and figured you’d learn as you went along.
• Your independence may have cost you some old friends from the old world, but you had to go with your gut even if that meant leaving them behind to make new friends in your new world.
• Each and every day, you’re making and playing by your own rules, even when the lack of a clear path scares you.
Dude, you’re punk rock.
And if this is just dawning on you, I have more news: The rules you used to live by no longer apply in quite the same way. The judgements of the same old people no longer matter as much as they used to. You’re operating by a different set of standards, among a different set of peers. And I’m betting you’ve never even thought about it.
I’ll bet you figured, “I’m that same ‘normal’ person, but now I run my own business.”
Um, no.
Now, you’re in a new world. You’re with the rest of us punks. Welcome aboard.
You don’t need business help. You need a whole new paradigm.
One of the reasons that Lee and I decided to create our new course is because so many entrepreneurs are “accidental punks.” They grew up in the normal world, played by normal rules, and associated with fellow Normals. Then they created a business, and kept thinking of themselves in the context of the normal world, playing by normal rules, and relying on the guidance of those same old “other Normals.”
So many accidental punk rock entrepreneurs thought they just needed business tips, when in fact they needed perspective on a whole new way of being.
What we wanted to do was to take that new punk rocker, and introduce her to herself.
We wanted to give her new guidelines, and teach her how to find her own new rules by exploring her probably-as-yet-unappreciated rebellious spirit.
We wanted to show her that her goals are probably closer than she thinks, once she loses the veneer of outdated “normal” thinking.
We wanted to show her how to break the rules she’s been living by that no longer matter and are holding her back, while showing her which rules make sense to keep abiding by.
We wanted to arm her with a new set tools that will allow her to start from where she is today, with the resources she currently has — and move stepwise toward exactly where she wants to be in life.
We wanted to show this newly realized punk rock entrepreneur how the people she respects got where they are today by knowing who to talk to, how to talk to them, how to make deals that win for everyone, which rules to break, and when and how to break them.
Lee and I are behind on launching this course because the content keeps growing and growing (we’re adding a lot of bonus stuff that we hadn’t planned on having, contributed by successful folks you may know and/or aspire to be like), and because Lee keeps twisting my arm to lower the price. It’s now half of what it was a week ago.
When this project started, we began with Stephen King’s metaphor that says that stories are objects that already exist, but that are buried. It’s the author’s job not to create those stories, but to excavate them.
Projects are like that, too. What we’ve unearthed isn’t what we expected. It’s way cooler. We thought we were unearthing a buried Cadillac, but it turned out to be an alien spacecraft with two-foot tailfins and a really badass sound system, and a disco ball hanging from the roof. And there was a cooler in the back that was full of bottles of Yoo-Hoo.
You absolutely have to check it out, you punk bastard. Fill out the little form below to be notified when we launch in a few weeks, and to have a shot at a pre-launch discount.
And rock the fuck on.
My partner in crime Lee Stranahan and I will be launching our new course, Question the Rules: The nonconformist’s punk rock, DIY, nuts-and-bolts guide to creating the business and life you really want, starting with what you already have, on Wednesday, April 28.
It’s ridiculously jam-packed: 5 course modules on how to rock your business and life as an entrepreneur who colors outside the lines, and over a dozen interviews with successful rule-breakers whose names you’ll recognize.
If you’re a punk rock entrepreneur (and I know you are), you’ll want to check it out here because we’re offering an immediate free bonus prior to launch day.
