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This article was inspired from this thread here, my informal response, and is part of the Fastlane Newsletter <-- Click to subscribe.

Business is HARD. How to Make it IMPOSSIBLE.

An interesting conversation is going on at The Fastlane Forum about why succeeding in business is so damn hard.

The argument?

The problem may be personality fit.

Maybe you keep struggling because you’re playing the wrong game. You’re a tennis player trying to play basketball. Find a business better suited to your personality, your strengths, and your desired lifestyle, and success should become easier.

Yep, there’s truth in that.

But there’s also a dream-killing trap hiding inside it.

Because you can take something that is already HARD and, through your own rules, restrictions, excuses, and unwillingness to tolerate discomfort, make it damn near IMPOSSIBLE.

Think about an Olympic swimmer.

Elite swimmers tend to have bodies suited for swimming: long arms, long torsos, broad shoulders, large hands, favorable proportions.

Give someone that body, and becoming an Olympic swimmer is still extraordinarily HARD.

They still have to train and suffer.

They still have to wake up early, swim thousands of meters, lift weights, lose races, endure plateaus, get coached, correct weaknesses, and repeat the process for years.

I mentioned Michael Phelps in The Great Rat Race Escape and how his Wikipedia story is thousands of words long, but the process (the hard) behind his success was given a few short paragraphs.

The right body doesn’t make the Olympics easy.

It makes the hard possible.

Now take someone whose physical characteristics are horribly mismatched for elite swimming.

The same goal moves from HARD toward IMPOSSIBLE.

Business works much the same way.

You absolutely should pursue opportunities that fit your personality, skills, resources, and desired lifestyle.

• If you hate managing people, don’t deliberately choose a business requiring 500 employees.
• If you’re introverted, perhaps building a company that depends on nonstop networking and public appearances isn’t your highest-probability path.
• If you hate selling, perhaps don’t choose a model where your entire day consists of cold-calling C-Suite execs.

This demonstrates good positioning.

But good positioning does not eliminate HARD.

And that’s where would-be Fastlaners screw themselves.

You might find a game that fits you better, but then you demand that the game ALSO be easy.

The moment difficulty appears, you start negotiating with reality.

• This doesn’t fit my personality.
• I’m not passionate about this anymore.
• The market is saturated.
• The competition is too strong.
• This is getting too expensive.
• The margins aren’t good enough.
• The math is against me.
• This shouldn’t be this difficult.

And suddenly, what began as reasonable self-awareness becomes an elaborate defense system protecting you from discomfort.

I’ve watched this pattern repeat for years for many aspiring Fastlaners…

1. Discover a new opportunity and become wildly excited.
2. Work on it for a few weeks or months while novelty supplies the motivation.
3. HARD arrives. The work gets repetitive and paint-dry boring. The marketmind doesn’t respond immediately with echoes. Something costs more than expected, or takes longer. Either a skill needs to be learned or a weak skill you have needs to be improved. (In my case, this would be podcast interviews or on-stage speaking). Uncertainty appears. Risk becomes real. Progress slows.
4. Quit or pivot, justified by three or four perfectly rational explanations.

Then repeat the cycle with the next exciting opportunity.

The opportunity and justification change.

The common denominator doesn’t.

When HARD appears, the entrepreneur bails out.

Newsflash: HARD isn’t evidence you’ve chosen the wrong game. It is simply evidence that you’ve reached the part of the game where progress actually happens.

• Learning and selling is hard.
• Expanding your comfort zone is hard.
• Building competence is hard.
• Risking money is hard.
• Being uncertain is hard.
• Doing something for the 300th time after the excitement has worn off is hard.
• Waiting months for results is hard.
• Being wrong is hard.
• Getting rejected is hard.
• Changing your beliefs is hard.

And yes, sometimes HARD really does mean you’ve chosen poorly.

As @The-J forum member stated, maybe you’re just apex predator in the wrong place -- the polar bear wandering around Sahara.

Get the hell out of the desert.

Find your cold tundra.

But don’t make the mistake of believing it won’t be cold, and your prey hard to catch.

Notice the distinction.

Choose the game where your HARD has the highest probability of producing the outcome you want.

Then accept the HARD that comes with it.

I’m highly introverted. I have ZERO interest in managing large organizations or dealing with endless employee problems. Knowing this has influenced the kinds of businesses I’ve pursued.

I seek to align my personality with the business while still providing value.

But once I chose those businesses, I didn’t expect (or get) some magical exemption from difficulty.

• I still had to learn things I didn’t want to learn.
• Do things I didn’t want to do.
• Take risks I didn’t want to take.
• Deal with uncertainty.
• Solve stupid problems. (Many self induced)
• Persist when the excitement disappeared.

Your personality can help determine which mountain you should climb. It doesn’t give you permission to demand a mountain without an incline.

And every additional prerequisite you impose makes the mountain steeper:

• I won’t sell.
• I won’t advertise.
• I won’t learn that.
• I won’t hire.
• I won’t risk money.
• I won’t do anything repetitive.
• I won’t pursue anything I’m not passionate about.
• I won’t enter a competitive market.
• I won’t do anything that conflicts with my personality.

Keep building enough fences around yourself, and eventually you’ve constructed a prison.

Now success hasn’t merely become HARD.

You’ve made it IMPOSSIBLE.

So yes, find the sport that fits your body.

Find the business that fits your personality.

Find the pursuit that fits the life you actually want to live.

But understand what you’re buying.

You’re not choosing between HARD and EASY.

You’re choosing between different versions of HARD.

The swimmer’s body makes swimming a better game.

Yet, it doesn’t swim the laps.

And when those 6 AM laps get exhausting, boring, painful, uncertain, repetitive, yada yada, you have a choice:

Keep swimming.

Or climb out of the pool, find another sport, and convince yourself that this time you’ve finally found the one that won’t get hard.

Do that as a form of entrepreneurial psychosis, and you won’t merely make success difficult.

You’ll make it impossible.

Don't make hard, impossible.

MJ

This is day 1 of my new business. After 6 years of retirement and only half-assed entrepreneurial attempts, I'm getting serious again to build my new Fastlane vehicle.

This is a clean slate. I'm looking at everything as if I'm a complete beginner again. Using new tools, with a new business model, and testing new marketing strategies.

My business builds sales assets for high-ticket offers. This means lead magnets, sales brochures sent before or after a sales call, and related materials. Trust is essential for high-ticket sales, and such assets can help warm up a potential prospect or get them ready to decide. With high-ticket sales (say, $5,000), such an asset can completely transform a client's business.

I'm launching this business because I've built multiple lead magnets for my own businesses in the past and helped a client (@Fox / Rob) get incredible results from a lead magnet we produced together.

I have writing skills and understand what separates good content from bad. I also have experience hiring and managing ghostwriters. They'll be indispensable in this business as I don't plan to do the work myself in the long run. This is also new for me as I usually think what I can do myself but this time I don't want that. I'm going to follow Dan Sullivan's concept of Who Not How.

This is my public commitment to this business. I'll use this thread to document my progress, share experiences and lessons, and to inspire others to get action.

@MTF - The following is my take, and I'm going to give it to you as if you were IN FRONT OF ME, and paying $500/hour for my opinion as a mentor or life coach.

To start, IMO, this post is just an mental exercise for validation, to fit your worldview to the reality, when it does not.

Its square-pegging a round hole.

Your worldview is you don't want to embrace anything hard, and when things get hard, you quit, pivot, or switch to something more easy (or exciting because its new and gives you new hope)-- or as you want to narrate, more suitable to your personality.

Your continual struggles to make progress comes down to this refusal, not fitting business ideas to your personality.

@AceVentures said something similar in reference to resistance to learning when things get hard.

AceVentures said:

It remains hard because you remain stubborn - incapable of perceiving it in another way with which you could actually produce your intended goal.

Click to expand...

Antifragile said:

You have a huge list of things you aren't willing to do!

Click to expand...

Bingo. And those "things" are hard -- even when they fit his personality.

There are so many guardrails and fences in his mentality that any execution is nearly impossible.

When hard shows up, his brain makes an excuse.

• This isn't suitable to my personality.
• I never liked X.
• This isn't my passion.
• The market is saturated, I don't have a chance.
• This is too expensive, I'll be lucky to break even.
• The market is X, I'm wasting my time.
• All the math is against me... (see below)

We've seen this pattern over and over. Not for weeks, or months -- but years.

1. Declare X opportunity with extreme excitement
2. Work on X Opportunity for Y weeks until excitement fades
3. Hard appears (or, wow, this isn't as easy, cheap, or fun as I thought!)
4. Give up on X Opportunity with 3-4 mental justifications.

The common denominator?

When hard appears, @MTF you quit or pivot -- which is the greatest irony ever because your avatar is 3 feet from gold.

That said, you are correct in one astute observation...

Your effort should be put forth in activities that are suitable to your life, your body, and your personality.

Ever notice that Olympic athletes have body types suitable for their expertise?

A swimmer is long and lanky.
A sprinter is muscled.
A basketball player is tall.
A gymnast is tiny.

These athletes pursue sports that fit their life (or in their case, their body).

But regardless, they all had to embrace hard to get their results -- but their "hard" is easier because they chose a field in which their bodies fit the pursuit better than the average person.

Like @The-J said, a polar bear in the desert isn't going to perform well.

The same goes for life.

We're very similar in terms of introversion and not wanting employees, people headaches, etc.

This is why I'm not interested in building huge organizations, employees, yada-yada.

IMO, fitting your personality to your business ideas isn't your problem, and never was.

Even if you are a swimmer and find your pool, you give up when it gets hard. When things aren't exciting any longer, when risk shows up, when uncertainty appears, you're out.

You can have the swimmer body and swimmer identity, but if you refuse to do the work or grit through the hard, you'll never make progress.

By all means, find something that fits your personality and desired lifestyle.

But the hard will never disappear, and when it does appear, you disappear.

My take - I hope you can take some meaning from it.

Or, dismiss it and continue forward with the same constraints, the same beliefs, and the same prerequisites.

MTF said:

As for your question: I wrote a book recently and am working on a $5k project (unrelated). But I'm debating whether I want to go deeper into services, try with books again (despite all math against me), or forgo both and try e-commerce or go 100% on AI and use it to create some software for businesses.

Click to expand...

Day 1

Technically this isn't my day 1. The idea for this business was born on August 23. I chatted with Rob and he asked for my help with a sales asset he wanted to create. We promptly started working on this so he's technically my first client (and we also worked together a few years ago on a different asset).

But I call today Day 1 because today I started doing actual work on the business (while Rob is going through the draft of our current project).

I came up with a name earlier so yesterday evening I only needed to register my domain and today I created my website.

I always start new websites with WordPress but this time I decided to do everything in a different way. To create a sales page, I tested both Claude and ChatGPT. I followed this advice to get less boring ideas. It didn't work well with Claude but worked well enough for ChatGPT to create the right bones. I prefer Claude so I took ChatGPT's design and kept improving it with Claude. This was the first time I created a website with AI.

I used Opus 5 for most work and Fable 5.1 only as a critic for detailed feedback how to make it better (to save on credits).

I learned how to use Netlify to host the website for free and learned how to connect Formspree to my contact form. I usually pay for hosting and suffer with WordPress so it's really cool I didn't have to do it and don't have to pay for hosting. My only expense so far is $11.48 for the domain. I'll have to pay for Google Workspace in two weeks but for now I have a free trial.

This is the final result:


Current revenue: $5,000

Pro tip to get back some of that youthful energy: I'm taking myself back by listening to songs I used to listen to when I was hustling like crazy as a twenty-something. Song for today, my favorite rap group ever even though I don't condone violence lol:

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8hAnEaY-bM

IceCreamKid said:

They just care about price.

Click to expand...

"Your job in sales is to find out as soon as possible if the person in front of you sees the value in what you do, or just the cost. If it's just the cost then move on. Someone up the road will bite your hand off." (Blaise Brosnan)

Every time I ignore those red flags I end up regretting it.