Mistakes I’ve Made That Made My Learning Curve Longer
James commented on yesterday’s post with some interesting points. In the comment, he talked about the learning curve when it comes to making money online. I’ve been thinking about that today. I’ve got a lot of examples of what not to do that I’ve built up over the years, so I figured I’d share a few of them so that you can shorten your learning curve by not making the mistakes that I did.
I started my first online venture in 2010. Now, nothing I’ve done online has been a total loss (as in, I’ve never been wiped out financially and addicted to heroin, selling myself under a bridge or anything.) Most of my ventures for the first few years made tiny profits that weren’t worth it really. I certainly didn’t make anything close to a living wage.
All in all, my learning curve to the point where I could say, “I make money online” and “I make money as a writer” has been longer than three years. I’ve still got a long way to go, but now I can say those statements without any sort of guilt or hesitation.
Presumably, you want to do it quicker than I did. Follow these instructions and that should happen.
Shorten Your Learning Curve: Be Honest With Yourself And Leverage Existing Skills
As I’ve written elsewhere on this blog… I never wanted to be a “writer.” I wrote short stories, and even back when I was at school I had various bits of fiction, non-fiction and other stuff professionally published. I just never connected the dots and always wanted to achieve something new and shinier.
That was stupid.
It was particularly stupid when I came up with business plans that involved me having face-to-face sales skills or leveraging social networks that I didn’t have. That’s stupid because I’m not extroverted, I don’t really like social skills and even after working on it, my social/face-to-face persuasion skills are not great at all.
If I’d have said to myself, “Jamie… you’re actually pretty good at this writing thing, maybe you should stick with that,” I’d be a lot better off. I’d have been in writing for the several gold-rushes (Like Kindle in the early days, Kindle Unlimited 1.0, etc.)
If you have existing skills, then go with them. If it doesn’t look shiny or you’d rather be a rock star or something, give yourself a mental slap and then do what you’re good at.
Shorten Your Learning Curve: You Don’t Need More Information
I’m a geek. I’m an overthinker. I like building successful systems (which you’ll know if you read this blog regularly.)
In earlier years, I spent hours and hours and hours (I can’t really overstate how much time I spent doing this) reading and learning. I’d compare different experts on different topics and create syntheses of which was most likely to be correct.
I’d save tons of guide to my hard drive and read them, I’d bookmark hours of videos which I’d never watch and I collected all kinds of books.
This gave me a list of “things to do” that never got me closer to my goal. It was procrastination in its most dangerous form.
You don’t need more information. You need to limit your information to a couple of sources. I’ll talk about this more in the next point.
Information overload is a massive problem that affects most people who want to start businesses. It’s easy to get stuck in this rut because business “gurus” have info-products to sell so they’re pretty likely to overcomplicate stuff to a ridiculous degree. “Buy my product on networking,” “buy my product on leveraging your network now you’ve got one” etc.
Whilst those products don’t help, it’s up to you to recognise you don’t need them. What do you need though?
The Best Way To Shorten Your Learning Curve Is By Doing
I didn’t want to fail. I never got used to failing through school or early life, and was petrified of doing anything that made me look like I didn’t achieve complete success. Needless to say, this was a wrong approach.
To shorten your learning curve, you need to embrace failing as part of the process of getting better. There are a ton of reasons for this, but they boil down to one thing: No matter how great your information, teachers or ideas, there is nothing that compares in terms of building knowledge than getting real world data that you’ve created yourself.
I can look at a sales letter that’s made billions of dollars. I can learn from it. However, I’ll never get into the frame of mind that the writer had. The same is true of any business endeavour. However, with every sales letter I write myself, or every chapter or every business idea, I know exactly what I’ve done, why I’ve done it and so when it comes to moving forward, I can either add to, take away or change any aspect of an approach.
Now, I said in the last point that you need a couple of sources and that’s it.
Say you read an article on building a niche website. What you need to do as a complete beginner is read the article, say, “Hey… that looks plausible.” Then see if it works. By literally doing it. Not by thinking about it or reading a conflicting opinion.
If somebody gives you a blueprint, follow the blueprint. If you see someone doing something you’d like to do, then copy them. Do exactly what they do or say until you have enough knowledge and data to try different things.
Don’t think you know better than them unless you have the data to prove it. Sure, you might actually have a better idea than they do. You might actually see weaknesses. But you shouldn’t say, think or do anything different until you can prove it.
Doing something is the most important step you’ll take. There’s no amount of knowledge that can make up for action, and I wish I’d learned this a lot sooner than I did. Also, like I found out – most “failures” aren’t going to be complete failures. Every project you break even on is a success because you aren’t in a worse position than when you started and you’ll have learned something new.
Finally my approach nowadays when it comes to doing is to set unreasonable goals and then achieve them. Making a single website is a goal and you’re going to get some usable lessons from it. Building multiple websites will give you more data and more lessons and you’ll learn more. You lose nothing by throwing yourself in and doing as much as you can. This also helps because you become immune to the rejection and failure feeling if you have more projects on the go: I can’t even remember the amount of failed attempts at things I’ve had now, and they don’t matter. Once, a failure might have hurt, but now I probably won’t remember it.
Final Thoughts, Levelling Up And The Game Never Ends
Another thing to think about when it comes to shortening the learning curve for a particular skill or goal is that it’s a curve: You’re going to have periods of exponential growth and you’re going to have stalled periods where you seem to be putting in a lot of work for absolutely no benefit. You have to ride those out.
Also, remember that there’s no “end of the game.” If you want to make money online, the scale starts at “Not losing your life savings” and ends at “build the next Google and make billions.” You’ll always be able to do better, have better ideas and you’re never going to have an “I’ve made it” moment.
Embrace that, and bear it in mind with your projects.
I killed a lot of projects far too early. I had what I thought were winning ideas and then after six months I abandoned them because they were going nowhere. Some of those same ideas would have gotten me to my goals by now if I’d stuck with them.
To wrap this article up, I’ll summarise (as this has been a winding trail of an article.)
Shorten your learning curve by doing the following:
- Pick something you have a natural aptitude for and look to make that better as opposed to build a new skill
- Put most of your time into doing stuff and learning by trial and error, even if it seems futile.
- If you have a plan or someone gives you a plan, stick to it until you can split-test. Don’t flit from one idea to another.
- Don’t spend much time on research, reading or other non-doing activities. One to two authority sources and a single blueprint is all you need.
- Stick with your projects for as long as it takes.
- The more projects you undertake, the more data you have, the quicker your learning curve.
That’s about all I could tell you without going into specifics and making this article book length. Each of those bullet points could be its own article, so maybe I’ll do that in the future. In the meantime… stop reading and start doing.