You may have some of these bad thought patterns. You may have all of them.
Whatever the case is, reflecting on some of these ideas may help you push yourself and your website forward.
I know they have helped me a great deal.
1) You expect recognition or feedback
Nobody is going say you did a “good job”. And you are not getting a pat on the back when you finish a particularly difficult task either. So don’t sit around waiting for it.
Most of us are way too accustomed to this pattern. It’s ingrained in us. We expect recognition when we feel like we did a good job.
Why else do the work in the first place?
This mindset can do a lot of damage. When you are pushing your limits, doing new things, experimenting and growing as a result thereof, you are not going to get immediate recognition.
You may not get any at all.
In fact, what you need to learn is that feedback of any kind is not something you immediately receive as a website owner.
When you create a new, awesome page on your website, the results are not going to show themselves anytime soon. You may have to wait months before you are able to see the outline of a result.
And when you finally do see the results, you may not even like what you see. But you need to be able to handle this if you want to grow.
To build a website on your own, you need to be secure with yourself and forget about outside recognition and feedback.
You should have faith in your own work. If you do not have it now, work and improve until you do.
Forget about the outside world. The only recognition that matters is your own. Your own recognition that you are moving towards your goals. And that recognition should be enough for you to push yourself towards new limits.
2) You think success is flashy
It’s easy to see flashy, glamorous stuff and mistake that for success. But true success is much more mundane than it looks.
Success is a daily grind. It’s waking up early. It’s working persistently on your craft.
Success doesn’t mean you are free from the struggles of life. On the contrary, you may feel even more pressure on your shoulders. And problems? They are still coming at you in increasingly large numbers.
Success is just reaching another level. Once you reach your goals, you need to set new ones. And the climb continues.
The best you can do is learn to appreciate this climb. Enjoy the journey. If you want to stay successful, the climb never ends. So it’s better to relish it than constantly being on the lookout for the flashy, overnight success that will supposedly change everything.
Success doesn’t work like that.
Try something more like this:
“Championships aren’t won in the theater of the arena. They are won in the thousands of hours of training and the 5 AM runs in the rain when everyone else is sleeping. That’s where it’s won. The heart of a champion is a light switch that’s always on — it doesn’t go on and off when someone’s watching — it’s constant. It’s how you look at something if your name is attached to it — that you do it right — every single time.” — Greg Plitt
If you are not ready for the training, you are never going to experience the success that comes with it.
Next time you see an overnight success story, remember that there are most likely hundreds, if not thousands, of hours hidden behind the scenes. Because that’s where the real success happens.
3) You are listening too much to the emotional part of your brain
There are two forces inside you in a constant battle: the logical you versus the emotional you.
I bet you have felt this battle before. You probably feel it quite often. It’s especially dominant when you are doing something you want to instead of what you know you should do.
The want is the emotional part of your brain, and you are still letting it win too often.
It’s when you want to watch another episode of your favorite series, but you know you ought to prepare yourself for sleeping.
It’s when you take another piece of cake, while you know it will make you feel miserable as you are trying to eat healthier.
You need to start helping the logical part of your brain win these fights.
It’s an uphill battle, but it is possible to strengthen this part of your brain. Especially if you get help from your environment. Like setting sleep preparation rules and not buying cakes you know you’ll eat when you shouldn’t.
You need to start taming the emotional you while following the logical advice more often. With this, you can start guiding yourself better.
Knowing about these forces is the first step towards controlling them. Next time you feel split, remember what is really going on. Your inner forces are in yet another battle, and who wins is ultimately up to you.
4) You do not embrace the basic principles of making money online
Making money online is simple, but not easy.
A lot of people try to make the process of making money online much more complicated than it has to be. That’s bad. Creating a stream of revenue is hard enough as it is. You do not need to create more obstacles for yourself.
Here’s how to make money online:
Traffic x Conversion = $$$
And that’s it. You need traffic to your website, and you need to turn that traffic into money. Simple. As it should be.
But implementing this is far from easy. Getting traffic to your site is hard. You are fighting against websites from all over the world for attention. And if you manage to get visitors to your site, convincing them to hand over their hard-earned cash is no easy feat either.
Making money online is hard. But the basic principles are simple and should be kept that way. Everything you do should be aimed at improving these two things: traffic and conversion.
5) You think success is a straight line
My successes are very limited. But still, by now I have learned that when something good happens, it often happens in a backward, convoluted and not at all obvious way.
I have launched more failed websites than successful ones. But it is what I have learned from the failed sites that has helped me launch the successful ones.
My first succesful product was a traffic strategy I had learned for one of my failed websites. And the story of how that product came to be profitable is a whole other story of anxiety, failure and finally some success.
When I ran my best half-marathon to date, I had a huge hangover the day of the race. And some of the best wins I’ve ever had in sports were on completely unexpected days.
I bet you’ve had some unexpected wins in your life too.
I’m not saying you shouldn’t come prepared. It’s quite the opposite in fact. You should approach every attempt as though it will be your best one so so far.
Believing in yourself and believing that this may be your break is important. But with the odds stacked against you, chances are it ends up being another one of those.
And if it does, just remember that you are one step closer to success, wherever it may hide.
I’m not a great marketer or athlete, so my only hopes were (and still are) perseverance. Keep going, even if you have no idea where the path is taking you.
Eventually, that path will lead you to the highest step on the podium.
Success is as far away from a straight line as it can be. You’ll be wandering around, confused and lost, when it suddenly hits you from behind.
6) You do not understand or appreciate exponential growth and compounding effects
Humans have a hard time fully understanding just how powerful exponential growth and compounding effects are.
A good example of this is the paper folding illustration: if you were to fold a paper 42 times, it would be so thick that it would reach the moon.
Yeah, the moon! And by fold 50 you would reach the sun. 100 foldings and you have reached the radius of the known universe. Do that math if you do not believe me. It checks you. (You can also do a google search for “paper folding to the moon“. Others have already done the math. I love the internet.)
The math behind this is simple, but the illustration is still counter-intuitive as we are bad a picturing exponential growth.
Your goal may not be the moon, but you can still benefit greatly from exponential growth. Just take your social media account as an example. How can it be that other people are able to gain thousands of followers a day, while you are still struggling to get your first hundred?
Let’s do some simple math.
Say your goal is to grow your social media account by 20% every month. And say you started with just one fan, yourself.
After a year you would have 9 fans. After four years you would have 6,320 fans.
Not that impressive, eh? But at the four-year mark is where you would start to see the growth explode.
The fifth year, you would have 56,348 fans and after six years, 502,400. Seven years down the line: 4,479,450 fans. Yep. That’s 4 million fans.
Here’s what the growth would look like: (months on the x-axis and followers on the y-axis)
Seven years may seem like a long time, but most people reading this will never have that many followers. Ever. I probably won’t either.
Also, these seven years were based on starting at just one fan. The higher you are starting, the faster the growth is going to explode. At 1000 fans you would reach 1 million after just 38 months. That’s roughly 3 years.
Notice how slow the growth is at the beginning. Then imprint this in your brain. Next time you are discouraged about your results, remember the power of exponential growth.
If you just keep going, you will eventually reach the fun part where your results are going through the roof.
Another great example that most people don’t fully appreciate is the compounding effect of improving yourself, your website and your traffic in a combined effort to explode your growth.
Example: a website with 100 visitors a day. Converting a $10 product at 2%. Daily revenue: 100 * 2% * $10 = $20.
Say you increase your traffic by 50%. That would give 150 daily visitors. Your daily revenue would now be 150 * 2% * $10 = $30.
Daily gain of increasing traffic: +$10.
What about taking the conversion from 2% to 3%? The daily revenue would be 100 * 3% * $10 = $30.
Daily gain of improving conversion: +$10.
And what about improving yourself so you can create better products or services and increase your asking price to $15. Your daily revenue would be 10 * 2% * $15 = $30.
Daily gain of improving your asking price: +$10.
From these calculations, all of the three improvements yield the same effect. Not surprisingly as they are all improving a core metric (traffic, conversion, price) by 50% each.
The combined result of these three improvements would be a daily gain of $10 + $10 + $10 = $30, right?
Not quite.
See, by improving on several levels of your website, you are applying the compounding effect. Improving your conversion is good. But improving your conversion and increasing your asking price is not just twice as good. It’s much better.
The actual daily revenue from doing all three improvements would be: 150 * 3% * $15 = $67.5.
Daily gain of improving all three metrics: +$47.5.
Going from the initial $20 a day to $67.5 is an increase in revenue by 237.5%. That’s more than tripling your daily revenue by tweaking just a bit here and there on your metrics. We only improved metrics by 50% each, and the combined result is much greater than a 150% increase in revenue.
The compounding effect in play.
This was a lot of math. Sorry. As a computer science student, I may be a bit damaged when it comes to stuff like this.
But the calculations are not what’s important here.
All you need to take away is this: remember the rules of exponential growth when you are discouraged about early results of any growth project. Especially when it comes to gaining followers. And know the rules of the compounding effect. Improving one thing in your funnel is good. Improving two more than twice as good.
7) You think you can create a successful website without providing massive value
When I started out years ago, I did one thing consistently:
I was chasing the fast-lane to success.
I sought out new techniques, secret methods and whatever sounded like a quick path to a successful website. I would apply the technique for a few days or weeks and then quickly start looking for results.
My only problem was that the shortcut I was looking for doesn’t exist. Success doesn’t have a fast-lane.
I had this flawed thinking for a long time. And it held me back from ever getting anywhere with my websites. I didn’t have the patience to stay the course when the results didn’t appear immediately.
You need to provide massive value if you want any lasting success for your website. This fundamental principle needs to be in everything you do.
Accepting that you need to provide massive value is the first step. The second is that you understand it takes time to do so. Expecting results right away is the fastest way to discourage yourself from getting anywhere.
8) You are not setting aside time for the important stuff
Jeff Goins was right on the money when he wrote “You can’t say one thing and schedule another. Where you spend your time is where your values are.”
If you want to have a successful website, set time aside to work on it. It should be that simple. And it is. If not, you need to take a harder look at your priorities. And you’ll find them in the stuff you spend time on.
Are you prioritizing entertainment over education?
Are you prioritizing a relaxing afternoon over working on your website?
Are you sleeping in instead of pushing yourself to get up earlier?
It’s perfectly fine to have these prioritizations. But you should be aware of them. And you should make sure they align with your goals. Becuase it is not fine if your prioritizations are working against you.
If you want to get work done, you need to deliberately set time aside for it. And that means you have to give up something in return. What you sacrifice is up to you, but don’t expect to be able to have everything.
9) You do not want to be an outlier
Guess what, a successful website is an outlier.
Most websites fail to ever achieve what they were meant to do. Which means that if you want to be like everybody else, if you want to be normal, you should not get your hopes up about running a successful website.
If you want to be normal, you should be prepared to have an average website. And in this case, average means failing.
Being average feels good, comfortable and non-threatening. In many cases, it is preferable to being an outliner. Following the norm means that you automatically fit in.
But being average and normal should scare you. Just look at the statistics: the average person in many countries are overweight according to the BMI scale, the divorce rate is as high as 40 to 50% and half of all business fail during the first five years.
Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it?
Being normal is highly overrated. But many would rather go that route as it seems safer than trying to find your own path. If you want to have a successful website (and a great life in general), you need to stop trying to be average. If all you want is average, you are going to achieve mediocre results at best.
Stop trying to be normal. Normal sucks.
Being an outlier is the only way you are ever going to have a highly successful website.
(Stats obtained from from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_body_mass_index, http://www.apa.org/topics/divorce/, https://www.investopedia.com/slide-show/top-6-reasons-new-businesses-fail/)
Your thought patterns matter
I hope you learned something from these 9 though patterns. At least they should give some something to reflect upon.
Your thought patterns define how you see the world. And if you carry around the wrong patterns, you are not viewing the world in its true form. You are seeing a distorted version.
Luckily, you can change your patterns. And the first step towards changing anything is recognizing that something is not right.
Hopefully, some of these patterns will help you see just that.
