The Biggest Life Mistake You Can Make
This is the first blog post I’m writing for this blog in nearly two years.
Don’t get me wrong; I’ve written more than ever before in those two years, and as you’ll hopefully see, I’m a far better writer – as well as all the other stuff – than I was when I last left you.
But the poor, neglected blog project…
I’m not sure when any of you will read this, and by the time I take off the maintenance plugin, I’ll have written a dozen more posts. This one will be lost to time.
Let’s talk about why I’m writing.
Not Quite The Biggest Life Mistake I’ve Made…
So, currently I’m on a Twitter break. A Telegram break. A social media break, news break, media break; and honestly, I’ve been taking a bunch of walks, reading books; I bought a piano a couple of months back and I’m tinkering on that.
I started a bunch of internet business projects and generally, I’m getting my brain back.
Because as far as social media goes, I can say it’s not good for me.
It’s not the biggest life mistake I’m going to talk about, but the other day, I got sent a screenshot by a friend.
It was some guy bragging about how he stole some other guy’s wife and got her pregnant.
And another friend sent me an unrelated video from one of the blatant scam artists that have proliferated in the old business space I used to pay attention to. You all know who I’m talking about, and if you’re thinking, “Jamie… it could be one of two dozen obvious scam artists who are running blatantly obvious MLM schemes and coating it in some mythological bullshit so as to appeal to young guys with no real role models…”
Well then, that’s the point really.
Rather than join in the various pile-on stuff or turn this blog into “Jamie McSloy polices the business world,” I’ll just say this:
I don’t fit in.
Every month or so, I get a DM or two asking me variations on the same question:
“Jamie, do you consider yourself part of Money Twitter?”
“Jamie, are you a red pill guy or not?”
Honestly, it’s best for me to just say “no,” to it all and wipe my hands of it.
It’s all behaviour I don’t really care for, doesn’t fit my values, and, again without trying to become some sort of moral police, I feel like a god-damned alien reading some of the stuff on these places now, and can’t believe anyone falls for it.
That said…
These things are very much cyclical. Bubble created, bubble gets exploited, and bubble gets popped. The rats flee the sinking ship, and we need not concern ourselves with it.
Ultimately though, this stuff makes me unhappy, there’s little utility in it for me, and I don’t really care all that much.
Each time I take a hiatus from social media, I realise I’m one foot out of the door and getting closer to both feet leaving permanently.
And, we’ll talk about it in later blog posts, but nowadays I have business interests and revenue streams that don’t remotely require me spending time on social media. If those scale like I anticipate they will, I don’t have to worry about any of the drama, gossip or nonsense-peddling.
So, we’re correcting that mistake.
But it’s not the biggest life mistake… as I said.
The Biggest Life Mistake I’ve Made
I’ve been rebuilding this blog.
It’s been an absolute nightmare.
An exploit led to all of my WordPress sites going down, and unfortunately, I hadn’t been quite diligent enough with the backup plugins I was using. So ultimately, the files I had to restore from were corrupted and essentially, I had to spend months copy-pasting every single article into the blog, redoing all the images, links and everything, (I never kept records of those outside the blog backups themselves.)
All in all… it’s a pain and as I’m writing this, still unfinished.
So… not backing up work. A big life mistake, (go make your backups before finishing this article, kids,) but still not the biggest.
What’s been interesting is that I’ve gone back. 2016. 2017. 2018. So on and so forth. It’s all continuously struck me that I feel like a different person entirely. For better, for worse.
Each article I read, rewrite, update, and so on reveals some little piece of knowledge; little experience gained – a memory of some place I was at some place in time.
And really, what I’m trying to say is that I recaptured what I’ve been missing for a whole long time, if I’m honest with you.
Because at some point, I got trapped in this possibly egoic idea that I had a fixed sense of myself.
“How do I demonstrate I’m an expert? How do I show off my expertise?”
Scratch the record on that one… because once upon a time, and not so long ago, the absolute strength of all of this was that I was just figuring things out and writing about them.
Forget being an “expert copywriter.”
Sure, I’ve become one. Insert some status-builder like I’ve written copy that has won elections and written copy that helped Big Tech enslave us all.
Boring.
Forget building ecommerce stores and knowing more than the dropshipping guys about dropshipping when dropshipping was big.
It doesn’t matter.
The biggest life mistake I’ve made is not actually knowing what I’m good at, stopping what I’m good at, and – I know this has become a list of three – not relentlessly pursuing that in favour of some stupid stuff like falling into status traps and playing other peoples’ games.
That’s the biggest life mistake I’ve made, and let me bring it back around so we’re not doing a Dear Diary episode here.
The Biggest Life Mistake You’ll Probably Make
The biggest life mistake you’ll probably make is that you’re going to play somebody else’s game instead of your own.
You’re going to try and gain status, money or sex through pretending to be something. You might not even recognise it; but you’re already brainwashed by the flicking bulbs behind the screen you’re reading this on; you’re tempted by the highlight reels and the easy quick-fixes.
Your Mum wants you to be this and the girl you crush on had an ex with a better car than you. You want to start a business but you don’t know whether to do e-commerce, freelancing or just drop all your money into crypto and hold on for dear life.
They’ll tell you, “Fake it ‘til you make it.”
And honestly, the sad truth about that is that it’ll definitely make you a fake but you probably won’t make it that way.
Instead…
The actual way to “make it” – and I mean, in completely serious terms – the only way to make it is in finding your strengths, desires, and systems and methods for doing things.
Then sticking with them, doubling down, iterating and repeating and finding out what makes you yourself among all the other unique beings on the planet.
And when I say, “yours” I mean yours.
Not your friends’. Not your Mum’s. Not some idealised version of you that you’ve cobbled together through years of taking bits and pieces from reality TV, the cool kids at your school, and the remnants of all the “I’ll show ‘em” things you have accumulated every time you’ve been knocked back.
Do This Now
Immediately, unreservedly, don’t Pass Go or click and buy any of the products if I ever put any up for sale.
Do this instead:
Think about your motivations – where they come from.
Think about your life path and trajectory and the things you enjoy and are skilled at.
Really; wiggle them around in your head like a child with a loose milk-tooth; find which ones are ones that are actually yours. Find which ones have been planted there by others.
This will take time. It’ll probably be painful.
Get rid of them.
Also, get rid of the ones that are idyllic.
The ones that aren’t going to happen.
There are guys out there who are in their forties who daydream about “going back to college” and “doing things different”; maybe becoming a college footballer or a ladies man with all the girls they missed.
That’s what I’m talking about – get rid of all that.
Find what you think you is. Your skills, desires, wishes for the life you can have if you start putting it together and let yourself follow your natural course.
Then do it. Document it. Try it and change it and do it again.
Repeat this process next month.
Do this every month for the rest of your life.
That’s how to avoid the biggest life mistake; which is living a life that wasn’t ever yours.