This letter is for everyone struggling for a lofty goal and isn’t sure if it will work out.
I want you to know that one day, you will be absolutely sure. Eventually, there will come a moment where you will know intuitively, instinctively, deep down inside…
…That everything is going to be fine.
I call this the Golden Moment.
Whatever you’re working towards, you’re eventually going to find a method for achieving it. And this method will work. And when that happens, everything will be different. You’ll know with absolute certainty that you willwin.
You will get out of debt.
You will be able to afford a house.
You will be able to prove all the naysayers wrong.
Everything you want will be yours in time.
This certainty will come to you all at once, and all the fear and doubt will vanish, gone like the dark when you flip on a light. And it’ll be one of the best days of your life.
After that, there will still be uncertainty—but it won’t cripple you anymore. You’ll know that you’re on the right path, and that everything is eventually going to work out, regardless of any temporary roadblocks you hit.
All you need to do right now to earn that Golden Moment is keep moving forward. You don’t have to do the right things, you don’t even have to do things well. All you have to do is do things, do them consistently, and keep doing them consistently for long enough.
Now, obviously there’s are caveats to this. In order to earn this moment, you need to take care of three things.
Keep one factor constant
You can’t keep switching careers every three months. That’s exactly what I did at the beginning, and that’s why it took ten years for me to have my Golden Moment instead of two.
What you need to do is pick an arena and stay in it. That arena can be anything. It can be a goal, an audience, it can be an offer, a service, or even a lifestyle. But you have to pick one thing that you can stick with for years.
Think of your early life as a big A/B test. When you’re A/B testing, you only change one variable at a time. You can’t change everything all the time forever and expect things to work out.
If you want to be a photographer, stick with photography. Make one offer to one niche. Fail, then pitch a different offer. Fail eight or ten more times, and then pick a different niche. But don’t suddenly decide you want to be a web designer.
If you want to work in software development, stick with software development. Make one offer for one service. Fail, then pitch another offer. Fail again, then pitch another service. But don’t suddenly decide you want to do lead generation.
Think of mining for gold. Most of the gold isn’t near the surface—it’s buried beneath it. If you keep scanning the surface for gold without ever diving deeper, you’re going to miss the deposits that more perseverant miners will get.
Pick one thing and stick with it.
Don’t distract yourself
I’m probably going to write an entire letter on this topic soon, but for right now, you need to understand something:
You are a product.
And countless enterprises are trying to exploit you for their own benefit.
Social media. Television. Porn. Video games (particularly insidious for young men).
Look at all of the ways you spend your time, and ask yourself if the people behind the platform are in a position to benefit from you spending more time with it.
If the answer is “yes” to that question, you’d best believe that somewhere there is an entire team of people working very hard to make sure you stay engaged with that platform for as long as possible. This is especially true of anything with ads.
When you get hooked on a platform like this, it sucks up huge chunks of your life. If you have Steam, I challenge you to tally up the hours you’ve spent playing the video games in your library.
Look at how many hours you’ve played (not including games you’ve played outside Steam), and do the math. If you’d spent that much time on literally any productive endeavor, how much better off would you be right now? The answer to that question might disgust you.
Ensure that you’re not distracting yourself from accomplishing your mission. Yeah, it’s easy to just succumb to instant gratification and binge watch Family Guy from season 1 for the fifth time.
But the low cost of each bad decision compounds over time. And I promise, if you spend too much time indulging in time-wasters that add no lasting value to your life, you will regret it.
Don’t decrease your expenses… increase your income
YOU CANNOT SAVE YOUR WAY TO FREEDOM.
Yeah, I know your grandfather saved 20% of his income for his entire career and now has $800,000 in his retirement account. But your grandfather is also 83 and really tired.
If you want to enjoy all the material world has to offer while your body is still young enough to make the most of it, you have to be bold and aggressive.
If you’re not where you want to be financially, cutting out the $150 you spent last month on eating out is not going to fix the situation. You cannot save your way to freedom unless you are earning enough to make saving worthwhile.
Your $5 a day Starbucks habit is not the problem. Your pathetic income is the problem.
If you’re in your 20s and making less than $75,000 a year, ZERO dollars should be going into a retirement account. Every single dollar you make should be going into your business and your brain. Into becoming more valuable.
You have to understand that you aren’t paid for your time, even if you’re paid by the hour. You’re not even paid for the effort you put it. You are paid for the value you create.
The more time, money and effort you put into learning to create more value, the faster your golden moment will come.
Stay consistent, stay focused, and experiment aggressively with new ways to increase your income. Do this for long enough, and your Golden Moment will come out of nowhere. And you’ll never be the same again.
Stay hungry.
—John
