I tend to be hard on myself.
My wife once thought that maybe it’s because I’m a perfectionist but I took a 10-question online quiz that said that I’m not. So that’s pretty conclusive.
The reason I bring this up is because if you asked me if I viewed myself as a successful person I would say, “In some ways yes, but I don’t feel like it.”
But objectively, I’ve done fine. I’ve been able to cover my family’s needs and many of our wants. I started my own law practice from the ground up. I then sold this practice and moved my family to a lake house near Seattle. Here, I’m able to pursue other career objectives and projects–like this one!
But in the mix of all of that, I’ve definitely started a fair amount of projects that have led to no results–other than sometimes fond and sometimes frustrating memories. And a lot of what-ifs.
Throughout all these experiences, the most common feeling I’ve had is the feeling of not quite knowing what to do. If that’s how you’re feeling, let me share some insights on what I’ve learned about that.
1. Take Responsibility for Your Actions–Don’t Pass the Blame.
Back in 2016 or so, I attended a business conference by a guy who ran in circles with a business influencer I followed. And by “influencer” I mean John Lee Dumas, who is totally legit in my opinion. I joined a mastermind group with JLD and he helped me get a podcast up and running in the right direction.
But I’m not going to say who was running this particular conference, so don’t ask.
I went to this conference because I was hoping to learn how to take my podcast to the “next level”–which to me meant making oodles of money with it. I thought I would be learning practical advice–the secret “how to” information you need to know. I thought we would go over things like marketing strategy, how to establish key performance indicators, financial bootstrapping tips, or the nuts and bolts of Facebook ads.
Instead, it was a pseudo-therapy, quasi-religious conference on mindset. The theory is that everyone has something within them that is holding them back from becoming the person you really want to be. Once you can identify and overcome that issue, you have removed the inner roadblocks that will overwise self-sabotage your success.
Maybe they are right about that. I wouldn’t know because I blew off their program without ever actually identifying my mental issue.
You were supposed to blame your parents–usually your dad.
I thought about that, but ultimately I’m not buying it.
It’s too easy to blame your parents for all your problems. Plus, as a parent, I definitely feel like it’s a darned-if-you-do and darned-if-you-don’t type deal. If I do too much for you, I never let you learn and grow on your own. If I let you do too much, you never got to have a real childhood. If I tell you something I think you need to hear, I’m emotionally abusive. But if I don’t tell you something you need to hear, I don’t care enough, which is also emotionally abusive. There’s no winning the game.
So ultimately I refused to pin any blame on my lack of business results on my parents. They raised me better than that (and I hope that’s true for my kids too).
And to me, that’s the first step in deciding what to do next: accepting the responsibility.
Before you can start any business, you have to be willing to say, “the buck stops here.” You can’t blame anyone else for your lack of success or inaction. It’s not helpful.
Once you accept that you are fully responsible, you can start moving forward.
2. Experiment on your ideas.
I’ve written before about how I didn’t know what I wanted to do when I was in college, so I ended up going to law school.
I worked on the podcast I mentioned earlier while I was practicing law. The scrapped the podcast because it wasn’t making the return on investment I needed–I made too many mistakes with it (one of them fretting too much about mindset). So I had to decide what to do next. I didn’t know exactly what that would be, but I was in a place where I needed to make money fairly urgently.
I thought the best way to make money fast was to rely on my law degree. At the time, my family and I were in a smaller city in Southeast Idaho that had depressing wages for attorneys.
I was going to either find a job somewhere else or hang my own shingle. I thought about taking a job in Salt Lake City with some awesome guys I knew from law school. I was gung-ho about it until I started looking at where I would live and got stuck in Salt Lake City traffic. I couldn’t do it. So I decided that hanging my own shingle was the route to go.
Even in hanging my own shingle, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was going to do. I wrote out a big list of ideas with pros and cons for different areas of law. Then I immediately started testing those ideas. The way I did this was by contacting attorneys I knew to see if there were any people covering that area of law and to hopefully get some referrals.
I went out to lunch with a couple attorneys in my area and went over my list with them to see what they thought. One item on my list was “autofraud,” which is suing car dealerships for fraudulent sales. From that one lunch meeting I got two cases. Those cases made me my first $16,000 as a solo practitioner.
From there, I just wrote a letter to more attorneys in the area telling them to send people who were complaining about car dealers to me. I got five more cases within two weeks of sending out that letter.
Then I just started writing about used car fraud and consumer cases on the internet. Before I knew it, I had so many people coming in through organic traffic and or referrals that I didn’t know how to handle it.
My point: I would have never found my niche if I hadn’t experimented with my ideas. I had to test the waters and evaluate which idea would work the best. I tested out getting a job in SLC. I tested out different areas of law. It’s just a process of testing and evaluating until you find what gets the results you are looking for.
I was fortunate to have people around me who were willing to listen and give me a chance. I will always be grateful to them. I’m actually going to drop a name here: Blake Murray (<– not an affiliate link). If you are in SE Idaho and want an attorney who is not only competent but just a good guy in all the ways you can think of, that’s Blake Murray. If he hadn’t been willing to take time out of his day to have lunch with a stranger, and then to actually listen and send me some referrals, I wouldn’t have had the successful run I had while I was there.
3. Consistently Repeat Steps 1 and 2.
I don’t care if you have the “right mindset.” I don’t care if you have a specific goal or a dream board.
The bottom line is that you are always responsible for your decisions. Whether that decision is action or inaction, it’s still your decision.
If you decide that you need to explore your mindset, try it and see what happens. If you think you can’t take action without a specific goal, set that goal and see where it gets you. If you think it might help to meet someone for lunch, ask that person for a lunch meeting. If you think you need more education, get more education. If you need help, ask for help. Maybe these ideas end up working or maybe they don’t. Either way, you will have successfully tested one more experiment on your journey.
But this I know for sure: if you’re experiment is to wait-and-see if you somehow find more time later or if someone comes to tell you what to do, you’ll never get anywhere. I’ve tried that experiment. Lots of times.
If along the way you ever start blaming someone else or the world for your lack of success, you are setting yourself up to fail.
How I’m applying my own advice
Presently, I’m taking my own advice by repeating these steps so that I can find my voice and niche in the internet space. My goal is to at least make $1 online by doing something that I think is awesome. Right now, that’s this project, the Fickle Father project, where I’m allowing myself to experiment by sharing my thoughts and interests without too much overthinking. My next experiment is to come up with a publication schedule for more consistency. So I’m going to try that out and see where it gets me.
But at all times, I’m accepting that I’m responsible for where this project goes. If I don’t like the way it’s going, I am responsible to change it. If I don’t want it to go a certain direction, I’m responsible for not letting it go that way. If I decide to shut it down, there’s no one to blame because I would know it is my decision to shut it down.
This is just one more experiment in my life’s journey. I’m excited to see what I learn from it.
What’s your experiment?
Where are you in your journey? What ideas are you testing out now? What do you think works? Share it now!!!!!
