<div class="bbWrapper">It was 7 a.m. Saturday morning. Without an alarm clock, I woke up after a night of barely sleeping at all. <i>Just one... please just one</i>. I opened my laptop, navigated to my admin page, and took a look at my stats for my landing page.<br />
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34 email addresses. I was so happy I almost started crying.<br />
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<i>34 emails. I can't believe it worked so well. </i>I navigated off the stats for my landing page and went to the stats for my actual product. Email addresses were all well and good, but it didn't matter so much if I didn't actually make any money. As I clicked the link leading to the sales statistics, I could feel every heartbeat. And then I froze. A metaphorical cannon ball smashed me in the stomach. I felt my heart sink.<br />
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I had just spent $600 on Facebook ads (a lot of money when you're 18!) and in exchange, I had ended up with 34 email addresses... and no sales. This pattern was repeated in the network marketing company I joined the next month, and in the Amazon FBA program I joined two months after that.<br />
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I failed. I utterly, completely, abominably failed.<br />
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I don't want to spend much more time talking about myself except to say this: I failed. Here, I want to tell you why, so that you may heed my mistakes and RUN.<br />
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<u><b>Reasons I Failed</b></u><b>:<br />
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1. Laziness - I was unwilling to put hard work into learning, researching, and marketing. I wanted a quick way to wealth and a way without much work involved.<br />
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2. Uncommitted - I was willing to chase dollars. In fact, that was all I was willing to do. Value was secondary to the almighty greenback. This led to me not sticking with good plans and quickly pursuing bad ones that had great copywriting.<br />
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3. No Due Diligence (DD)/Common Sense - My first product (the one I spent $600 on to get 34 emails) was a financial product. I consider myself skilled in the financial realm. I was doing well in stocks, could reasonably explain why a traditional home was <i>not</i> an investment, and knew how to reduce tax burdens pretty well. The problem? I was 18. <b>No one wants financial advice from an 18 year old</b>, particularly the kind of financial advice that says "hey, what you're currently doing is <i>stupid</i>".<br />
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This theme was reflected multiple times in multiple ways. I did not do research on the value of my product, on copywriting, on landing pages, or on marketing in <i>any business I was in</i>.<br />
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<u><b>What I Learned<br />
</b></u><br />
1. Most online courses are useless (I haven't found any that have helped me, but surely someone somewhere has something online that is pretty decent) so do not buy them. Almost everything you pay for can be found for free (podcasts, Youtube, and just plain internet diving are great).<br />
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2. Find an idea, research it until your eyes bleed, and if it's a good one, stick with it until it can be proven to absolutely not work. My mistake was that I went from one idea to the next, when in reality, <i>I probably could have made some income from all three of the listed ideas</i>. In my opinion, it is better to give one bad idea 100% instead of giving ten good ideas 10%. This goes with what MJ says in both TMF and Unscripted: do not chase dollars. Provide incredible value.<br />
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3. We are exactly as wealthy as we deserve to be. This will probably stir some pots, but I have found that net worth is directly correlated to how much someone deserves it. There are some flukes, to be sure (like winning the lottery), but in 90% of our lives, our average net worth is exactly what it deserves to be. If you want to be wealthy, you have to become someone who deserves to be wealthy. <i>Fight for your life</i>.<br />
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4. Never let others determine who you will be. My family and friends told me that every business I tried would fail. They said it was impossible to build a business that could fund my lifestyle. They said it was "so much hard work" to do something and have it fail. They told me that they didn't want me spending my life building "businesses". They were wrong. They were (sorry mom) stupid. And after failing, I finally did it. I built a successful website that funds most of my life and is growing daily. Trust yourself most of all.<br />
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5. Fail daily. If you do not fail at something daily, you will probably not succeed very often either. Learn constantly, love generously, ignore the loud people, and listen to the quiet voices. Fail daily. I had to fail multiple times before I finally succeeded, and each failure taught me something new. Never give up on the life you want. Fight to the death for your dreams.<br />
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I'm new here (joined August 19th), but I hope that this positively impacts someone. Please feel free to ask me questions below, agree with my sentiments (or disagree. Whatever works for you), and tell the rest of us about some of the failures you've had! I think that many times, our greatest victory comes right after our greatest failure.<br />
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Have a great read!</div>
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