Let’s start with a quote by Charles Munger.
We are all learning, modifying, and destroying ideas all the time. Rapid destruction of your ideas when the time is right is one of the most valuable qualities you can acquire. You must force yourself to consider arguments on the other side.
If you want to find success then staying on the same path requires that you’ve luckily chose the right path. This doesn’t happen for all of us and most of us stay on the wrong path for too long because we are scared to destroy our ideas.
There could be a better way to proceed but you won’t know this unless you destroy your idea.
But what exactly does that mean?
For me, it means questioning the First Principle that we are starting from. To make this easier I’ll explain my journey to learning how to build a successful online business. If you want to make a shit ton of money then pay attention.
Idea 1: You Need a Brilliant Idea
Like everyone else that gets started in business, I thought that the only way to succeed was by having a brilliant idea.
The problem with this is that your ego will make you believe that any idea is brilliant. The first book I ever wrote I thought it was a brilliant idea.
It made $0.
Maybe you didn’t need a brilliant idea. What you needed was a bigger audience.
Idea 2: You Need a Big Audience
So then I worked on trying to build a big audience. It was going well because I didn’t play the games that others played.
I should’ve if I wanted to face the Second Reality head-on. Instead, I continued to play the way I wanted to play and made no money.
My third product was a course on web development. I put it up on a site that had a huge audience and I made $20,000 in a weekend.
This was proof of my idea!
And while it’s true that a big audience can help immensely, there are plenty of stories of social media influencers with big audiences that are struggling to get by because their audience isn’t a right fit for anything.
I stopped growing my audience which meant whenever I sold anything I had to sell it to a relatively small audience. So I had to force myself to destroy the idea that you needed a big audience to make money.
Idea 3: You Need the Right Audience
I convinced myself that if I could find the right audience then I would be just fine and that’s how I operated for more than a decade.
I wasn’t getting rich but I was doing just fine by finding the right audience and talking to them.
The problem was that I didn’t like my outcome. I wanted to make more money but for a while I believed that this meant I had to play the same games that everyone else played. You know where you post a ton of clickbait just to get attention only to trick people with your content about something else.
There had to be a different way to play, so I had to destroy all of my ideas about what it took to build a successful business and try again.
Idea 4: Successful Businesses Are Built on Vibes
Success in this case can be subjective. Is success how much money you make? How many people you impact? How well known you become?
We can all have our own definitions of success, but when I looked around at the business that I thought were successful and the ones I wanted to emulate I noticed something.
The only thing they had in common was the good vibes of their customers. Or I could call them fanatics.
They didn’t always have the best product. They didn’t follow all of the marketing techniques.
But they all had good vibes.
This sounds absolutely silly to say outlaid but it’s true. If you could make your people feel a certain way then you were guaranteed success with your business as long as you stuck with The Pocket Business Formula:
Audience x Offer = $$$$$$This meant that if you could find a way to create an amazing experience throughout every touch point of your business you stood a great shot of finding success.
Was this necessary? Not at all for short-term success, but I’m always thinking long-term. I want to play the Infinite Game knowing that the only objective is to stay in it.