SPI 852: Why Making Money Online is Easy (But Still Feels Hard)

SPI 852: Why Making Money Online is Easy (But Still Feels Hard)

Pat Flynn: Making money online is easier than ever, but why does it still feel impossible? And it’s super annoying, right? There are more tools and platforms to help us succeed now. You don’t have to know how to code, or do any of those technically challenging things anymore, and all the information you need is out there.

And you know it’s possible. You’ve seen other people do it. Which probably adds to your frustration when you wonder, “Why not me?” But here’s the thing, technically making money is easier than ever, but emotionally and psychologically, it’s actually harder than ever before. But once you understand why it’s harder psychologically, you can combat and counter those thoughts and finally start to make some progress.

So let’s talk about it. To start, I want to share some interesting results from a survey that I ran with my audience of aspiring entrepreneurs. I asked them what their biggest fears were. These are specifically people who have yet to even pull the trigger with an online business or some sort of online platform and two main reasons floated to the surface.

Number one, they didn’t want to waste their time. And number two, they didn’t want to waste their time. They’re money, time, and money. This is exactly why the subtitle for my book, Will It Fly?, is How to Validate Your Business Idea So You Don’t Waste Your Time and Money, which, thankfully, went on to become a Wall Street Journal bestseller.

But those survey results were from 2015, over 10 years ago. But 10 years later, not only are the fears the same, they’re even worse now. Why? What is the actual root reason for all of this? Well, because as Kendrick Lamar says, it’s too many options. Today, you have an overwhelming number of choices to start a business, right?

There’s so many choices you have. The sheer volume of options you have can lead to decision fatigue and anxiety about choosing your right path. So what do you do? Should you start a YouTube channel or a podcast or maybe TikTok, or should you be on Instagram? Should you do long form video, short form video, LinkedIn, e commerce, coaching, freelance?

Should you write a book, create a course? What do you do? Right? There’s so many options. And the fear of making the wrong choice is so overwhelming that you’d rather not choose anything at all. You prefer to stay in your comfort zone, even though you’re not completely happy with it. It’s better than losing or fearing the idea of failure and wasting that time and money.

Because what you have right now is guaranteed. You’ve been in it before. But the other part of this is true. If you just keep doing the same things, you’re going to keep getting the same results. Here is the truth though. The big takeaway. It is through making wrong choices that you find the right ones.

And it’s hard. Because the wrong path is Is actually the shortcut to the right path. It’s so different than everything we’ve thought about, right? Because the only actual wrong choice is not making a choice at all. And it’s really hard. It’s one of the hardest things to do if you’re just starting out.

Especially if you are like me, a millennial, or you have been conditioned in school to believe that failure is bad. Which, for grade purposes, yes, failing is bad. But for entrepreneurial purposes, failing is good. It’s actually the shortcut to the right path. And it’s so counterintuitive, it’s so hard to get over.

You need to understand that m these mistakes that you make, these videos that you create that go nowhere, these scripts that you write that are terrible, that is the path to progress. You gotta be cringe before they binge. You gotta be a disaster before you become the master. Whatever fancy phrase you want to say.

Now, if you are curious about the process of choosing a single niche and building a brand and an audience around it, I do have a process called “brand in a hand” I’ll go over it really quickly, really quickly here for you. If it’s your first time hearing about it we have some links in the resources and in the description for you, in case you want to check that out and go a little bit more in depth with it, but imagine your hand, right?

Your hand, your palm is facing you and start with your pinky, right? Your pinky. Are the people, the people that you are targeting, who is it that you’re going to serve? You have to understand that or else you’re going to be all over the place. The ring finger, the next finger in line, and it’s ring finger for a purpose because this is their pursuits, their dreams, their ambitions, their goals.

What are those? You need to understand what they are. You might know them already because you are a part of that particular niche, or you might have to do some research and have conversations and understand them. Go in the DMs and start to learn about these people. Then you have your middle finger.

Middle finger for a reason because it is the problems, the things standing in the way of a person achieving those goals and succeeding. Then you have your pointer finger, which is the one platform that you will point people to where you will say, this is what it is and this is how it is and what you need to do, how you’re going to help them.

And then your thumb, when you put all of those fingers together, you have your thumbs up, and that becomes your product, your service, right? So five P’s, people pursuits, problems platform and then product. So that’s just a quick overview of brand in a hand. But when you take that approach, it really simplifies a lot of the route to success.

Again, with the understanding that you shouldn’t know exactly what to do. The only way to know what to do is to take action, to fail forward, fail and fall forward. Now, with regards to this overwhelming number of choices that we have to start a business, and really that is the root of this problem, and there’s no getting rid of that, right?

There are not going to be a less number of choices and ideas and opportunities out there. There are going to be an overwhelming number of more choices coming your way, which will make this even harder. So how do we succeed? Well, picking one strategy and moving forward is a start. You have to take action and start.

But there is another hurdle that you will come to immediately after you do that. And it is self doubt that you made the right decision, questioning the very choice that you just made, which is another symptom of, again, the underlying problem here is just there are too many options. It’s sort of like checking out at the grocery store.

If you’ve ever been to the grocery store and you know, there’s multiple lines that you can go down. You pick a checkout lane that you believe will be fastest, right? We all do it. We try to look to see which one has less number of people. You might look at other people’s carts to see what’s inside and go, okay, that person has way too many things.

I’m going to go into a different line. We do that, right? Because we want to make a decision that’s going to help save us time. But once you pick a lane, what happens? You start to doubt your decision, you look at the other lanes because those ones might seem to be moving faster and maybe you make the switch.

Only to realize that the lane you were originally in was maybe the one that you should have just stayed in. Or maybe not. We begin to question and overthink it. Now have you ever been to the grocery store when there’s just one line? Like, super late at night, right? What do you do? You just go to that line and you stand in it, no matter how long it is, and eventually it becomes your turn, you check out, and you’re on your way.

You didn’t have any other lanes to question yourself about, you just took the one path forward and got it done. Once you make a choice of what lane to go down in your entrepreneurial pursuits here at the start, by still allowing these other choices to be available to you, you find yourself susceptible to changing lanes or changing your mind again and again.

And if you’re like many, you end up feeling stuck in a cycle of indecision, never truly progressing, and always wondering if you’ve made the right choice. And imagine you go down a lane and you believe that you made the right choice, but you have that doubt and suspicion. How are you going to give your full self and full energy to this thing that you chose if you still have a doubt in your mind that this may not be the right choice?

This is the entrepreneur’s dilemma. It is by far one of the hardest things to do to make a choice and stick with it. So I have two strategies for you that are going to help you through this. First is something that I like to call just in time information. In fact, it was a mentor of mine, Jeremy Franson, from 2008, and his partner Jason Van Orden who taught me this, so credit to them.

But just in time information is the only information that you should be consuming when you’ve made a decision to move forward. And that is information that is about your next step in the lane that you’ve chosen. All of the other information, all of the other noise that’s out there, should be just, put your earmuffs on, right?

None of that matters. It’s hard because we live now in an age where there is so much information coming our way. Information that we didn’t even ask for. It’s literally getting pushed to us through notifications, through emails, through social. We need to be disciplined enough to only allow ourselves to intake the things that matter and the things that relate to the next step in our process.

That makes life so much easier, and it \\reduces not only just the noise and confusion, but it also reduces the potential for us to go, Oh, that’s cool. Maybe I should try that. Or, Ooh, that’s cool. Shiny object syndrome, right? Squirrel syndrome. It reduces that.

The second strategy to keep us moving forward is to commit not to the results of the lane that we’ve chosen, or the direction that we’re going down, but rather, commit to the work required to potentially see those results. Our success and our happiness related to the work we’re doing should not be based on the results of those things, because sometimes we cannot control them. We cannot control necessarily the algorithms and how YouTube feels that day or how TikTok feels that day.

But we can control whether or not we show up every day to create that video. Or that we put our best storytelling foot forward in that next script that we’re writing. That is what we should base our success on. And that commitment to do that for a certain period of time will, in more cases than not, allow us to get the results that we want.

And I’m going to tell you a very specific story about something that was recently done. Last year in 2024, I started a 60 day experiment to create a short form video on TikTok, which then was reproduced for Instagram and YouTube shorts as well. I started a new shorts channel for my Pokemon community called Short Pocket Monster.

And I said, you know what? I’m not going to link. to this channel or any of these short form channels from any pre existing platform or account that I have. I just want to see if I can commit to 60 days of publishing daily. Can I do that? And if I do that, no matter what the results are, I’m going to feel proud because by the end of 60 days, I’ll know whether or not this is worth it. Continuing moving forward, I’ve given myself the best chance to see if this would succeed or not. And if it doesn’t, great. I can put it aside and not have it be a lane that I could ever think about again. I can move on to something else. So what happened? Well, I started to create daily 60 second videos that I published on Instagram and TikTok and on YouTube.

And for the first three weeks, I was getting nothing, hundreds of views, randomly, and it just felt like it was kind of all for nothing. But I said, you know what, I’m only 21 days into this 60 day experiment. If I give up now, I might be giving up on that opportunity for some algorithm thing to finally happen.

And after 30 days, it took about a month, but after consistently showing up for a month, no matter what the results were, the results finally came. One of the videos that I published did very, very well. Started to see hundreds of thousands of views in a single day, which then lifted the rest of the videos in the archive.

And fast forward to today, now six months later, The YouTube channel, it’s about to cross 1 million subscribers. It already has half a billion views and it is generating over five figures a month at this point. The TikTok account just passed 1 million subscribers and it landed me a collaboration with the Detroit Lions, a completely unknown opportunity because they in fact had opened Pokemon cards before every game for good luck.

Somebody on their marketing team. Shout out to Neil. Larson, by the way, who connected with me on TikTok, and we created this unique opportunity for me in December or excuse me, at the beginning of January, to go and open a pack of Pokémon on Ford’s field. All because I committed to this experiment to see it through and give it the best chance.

And it didn’t happen right away, but it eventually happened. And what also happens when you do this more regularly, when you commit to something, when you fully focus, on that lane that you’ve chosen and nothing else matters. you start to get better at that thing that you’re fully focusing on. I mean, it kind of makes sense, right?

When you’re focused on something and nothing else matters, that thing just starts to improve. The quality of what you create starts to improve because you’re continually committing and recommitting to this thing and seeing it through and consciously trying to make it better. So in the world of these short form videos that I created, my process was getting better.

It was getting better. Taking me less time to edit every single time I did it. I started to create a template so it would be much, much easier and it just started to flow much better, right? What once took an hour and a half to edit, now takes 15 minutes a day. You start to understand your audience a little bit better the more you show up and the more consistently you show up.

As a result of, again, consistently not letting the outside noise break through. And I started to understand more about the nuances of the space, and what the audience liked, and what kinds of things triggered them, and what kinds of things I could include in the videos. And now the videos just continue to get better and better.

And now, within 24 hours, I’ll see over a million views across those three platforms, and half of those views are from non followers. So, incredible opportunities ahead. And it was only because I fully focused and committed to it, It reminds me of a story with Darren Rouse from ProBlogger.net when he started his digital photography school blog back in the early 2000s.

He’s one of the first more popular bloggers back in the blogosphere. He told a story on stage once when I was at at his event in Australia where he said his wife gave him six months to make digital photography school a viable business that was generating revenue. Or else, he would just go and get a full time job.

Because in the beginning, he was blogging, but he wasn’t really fully committed to it. He was kind of bouncing around and trying a bunch of different things. But once his wife said, Yo, you got six months. And if after six months, this isn’t producing an income, you’re getting a full time job. He committed.

And he committed to publishing daily, to getting something out there, and Digital Photography School, which, I’m not sure if he sold that eventually or not, but it was, at one point, one of the top websites in the world about digital photography and was generating a lot of revenue through sponsorships, through affiliate revenue and his own courses and products as well.

Shout out to Darren Rouse, who was a huge inspiration for me back in the early days when I started blogging in 2008, which if I do the math, that’s 17 years of doing this, which. Kind of boggles my mind that I’ve been doing this for so long, but despite the fact that every year there is seemingly some new platform and there’s new tech coming out that allows us to reach our audience and teach them and, and show up as an authority, and it is short form video, it’s a long form video, it’s podcasting, it’s blogging, and you know, there’s cycles of all of this.

Two things remain true. Number one, it is always about serving your audience and showing up for them. And the more consistently you show up, the better. And number two, it is always going to take commitment from your end to fully focus on something for a certain period of time, whether it’s six months like Darren or 60 days, like me, you might need some more time. But you have to commit and not let those outside noises distract you from what you’ve said yes to. You don’t have time to do that, but you have time to commit and try and discover whether or not something will work out. And if it doesn’t great, you’ve given it a chance and then you can move on.

Speaking of moving on, let’s move on to another thing that is really, really making it difficult for us to succeed today. And that is isolation and a lack of structure, right? So the second major challenge that trips up a lot of new entrepreneurs Is this isolation and a lack of structure when working online? I mean, I remember my nine to five job. It was actually nine to six as an architect. And the nice thing about that was I knew exactly when I was going to start. I had somebody tell me exactly what I was supposed to do and I would go home and work would be off my mind. The beauty of the nine to five or nine to six job having a boss. When you are your own boss, and you are dictating your own day, and there are no colleagues just a desk away to chat through a quick project with.

You’re crafting your own workday from scratch. And it sounds liberating, and it is, but without a clear structure, it can lead to not just a lack of motivation and focus, but a lot of frustration, a lot of running around in circles, and a lot of, again, self doubt as to whether or not you can do this. I experienced this for years.

When I started and it took me a lot of time to begin to finally feel confident in myself So imagine this you’re at home. You’re ready to work. But instead of having a set plan you find yourself bouncing between tasks you’re distracted by not just work related things, but even household chores or just the temptation to watch just one more episode of your favorite show on Netflix without the external environment of an office or the presence of coworkers or a boss to tell you what to do, staying on track becomes a personal responsibility that not everybody is prepared for right away.

And if you’re just starting out as an entrepreneur, this is going to be a big struggle for you. So to combat this setting up. A few things will help. Number one, and this really helped me even though it doesn’t sound like it would matter, but setting up a dedicated workspace is going to help. When I started out in 2008, I had a little corner of a nook in my office that was my workspace.

I had another computer for other things, or my phone, to dilly dally online and skedaddle a bit, whatever that means. But when it came to getting down to business and working on, back then, my computer, In the lead website, my architectural exam website, I had a space in the corner of my apartment with a computer, which is where that work got done, which helped me just mentally go into that space and focus.

It helped others around me at the time, my wife understand that I was in work mode and when I was out of that chair out of that little corner of the apartment, then, okay, I’m not in work mode and we can chat and we can talk about other things and stuff. And not only having a physical and dedicated workspace for that is important, especially if you’re working from home, but having a daily routine is crucial.

You want to treat your remote work as if it’s kind of like an office job, right? You start at the same time each day, you dress for success, even if no one will see you. Yes, it’s nice when you’re working from home that you can just work in pajamas, but there is again, this is the psychological part of all of this.

This is the whole point of this episode. You want to be psychologically ready to succeed. And in order to do that, you need a routine. And in order to support that routine, you need to change your clothes and in the morning, get up, put on clothes, get into work mode and start focusing, right? Nobody’s going to see you, but you see you and you feel you, you feel you.

And I feel you as well, because I was there to schedule breaks, refresh yourself, find a. productivity method or methodology that works for you. I’m, I’m hesitant to say, you know, Hey, do the Pomodoro technique, right? 25 minutes on five minutes off, 25 on five minutes off. Get yourself one of those Pomodoro kitchen timer clocks.

I’m hesitant to share a very specific strategy like that because. Like a diet, different people have different bodies that respond to food in different kinds of ways. And we have different minds that respond to different methodologies in different kinds of ways. What I would recommend is purposefully and consciously try to find a method that works for you.

It might be The Pomodoro technique, it might be the one thing a day for two hours each day. It might be like me having every day of the week, which starts at a certain time, be something different, right? Like Monday is my writing day, Tuesday is my podcast and video recording day, Wednesday is my meeting day, Thursday is more of a cleanup day, and then I have Friday off and we have a four day work week here at SPI.

So You have to find the structure that works for you. But the point being, you have to find a structure. You have to create structure. You have to have this mental understanding that this is the time to get this stuff done. And while we’re here, I do want to recommend something for you. If you do have a job already, yet, you’re still trying to create something new on the side.

One of the most helpful things that I received early on, and I want to pass forward to you is this idea of paying yourself first. And this was a strategy that was meant more for the wealth building community or or personal finance space right when you get a paycheck you want to take some of that and put it away In a nest egg that will grow and that is step one It’s similar to Mike Michalowicz and his idea of profit first in a business. Well pay yourself first, but when it comes to time, pay yourself in time first for this business and entrepreneurial endeavor that you’re going down, which may mean, and this is, this is what actually has helped a lot of people here in the SPI community actually start to see progress, which is you wake up a little bit earlier for yourself.

Typically, we wake up for other people because we got to take the kids to school because I got to go into work and help my boss build his dream business. But for you and your dream business and your entrepreneurial endeavor, when you wake up first for you and you have 45 minutes to an hour in the morning before people get up before it’s time to go to work dedicated to you.

A few things happen. Number one, you’re using your full energy as you wake up during the day. Hopefully you get a good night’s sleep. You’re using that energy for you and your progress. Progress is great, even if it’s just a little bit, a little bit each day that adds up. But secondly, knowing that you only have a certain period of time, a limited amount of time to work, you’re going to hopefully using just in time information, figure out what the next step is and learn all you can about that.

Maybe you take your lunch break at work to listen to a podcast about that thing that you’re going to do the next morning or on your way home on your commute, you’re listening to a YouTube video, not watching it, listening it while you’re driving about that next thing about the next steps that you’re going to take the next morning and you wake up jazzed, energized, because you’re doing something for you and you’re making that progress every day.

And what happens when you start to commit to that little bit every day, again, to pay yourself first. You start to gain momentum. That snowball starts to grow. It starts to go even faster. You start to get even more excited about it. You start to put away that Netflix that you were going to watch at the night to make more progress on this.

You start to find yourself and your momentum. But it starts with a little bit of structure. So, dedicated workspace and dedicated time and, if needed, dedicated time to yourself early. Start your day for yourself, so that you can be the best version of yourself to help serve others.

And finally, psychologically, a thing that is holding a lot of us back, especially in today’s age, and this is especially for those of you who are a little bit younger, because you’re so used to this, you are in fact quite spoiled with what you have access to.

It’s this idea of instant gratification culture. The third stumbling block is our culture of instant gratification. We live in a world where likes, shares, and viral content can seem like indicators of success and can happen overnight, which is true. Yes, it can. And we hear about it from others.

You read the success stories, you see it on Instagram, and this creates a distorted expectation that success in online business should also be instantaneous. And then when the results don’t come quickly, that self doubt, that frustration starts to creep in. Think about it. When you post something on social media and constantly refresh, you do it, I know you do it, to see if there’s likes or comments.

Now apply that to your business. If you were to start making progress and write a blog post, or create a video, or work on a lead magnet, or start to build your email list. If you treated that the same way and expected results, and you wake up and you have one new email subscriber, or zero, you’re going to immediately consider yourself a failure. Or if you launch a product and yes, maybe you put a lot of work into it or a service and you don’t see immediate sales, you might think it’s a failure, but that’s not how building a business works.

Building a business is not a snapshot of the work that you’ve just done. It’s a culmination of all the work that you’re doing and the things that you’re learning about your audience and the services and the products that you can offer them over time. It is a marathon, not a sprint. And I’d like to quote Gary Vee here, Gary Vaynerchuk.

He said this way early on and it really stuck with me. And it’s this idea of micro hustle, macro patience. In the world of micro, on the daily, when you’re working on your thing, you are hustling. By hustle I mean you’re finding that information fast, you’re cranking on those things in the time that you have allotted for that.

But on the macro level, you are patient with the results. You’re doing the work, but you’re letting those results come when they are meant to come.

That is the way to succeed. Patience is key here. So for you youngins out there, stop expecting results overnight. What you need to focus on is what I just talked about. Which is that commitment to getting the work done and hitting publish every day, or every week, or whenever it is. Committing to that and letting the results speak for themselves, but basing your happiness, your wins, on the fact that you showed up no matter what.

Even when the results weren’t coming in. When I interviewed MKBHD here on the podcast a long time ago, he said that his first 100 videos were for less than 100 subscribers. This is not an uncommon story.

So which story do you want to create? Are you going to be the one who commits and focuses no matter what, and despite there not being results right away, you keep going because you are patient, because you understand that building a long term successful business takes time, takes understanding, and takes a little bit of luck, but the more you put out there, the more luck is to be had.

Or are you going to create the story of bouncing around, trying a bunch of different things and having nothing ever really stick because nothing seems to work out for you. But have you actually given yourself a chance? Have you actually committed? 99 percent of the SPI audience has not. And we are here to help you do that with these podcast episodes, with our content inside of SPI and our community of like minded entrepreneurs, just like you, who were there, not just to help support each other through the learnings and the failures and the mistakes, but also celebrate the wins together and hold each other accountable to partner up together to mastermind together and to get inspired, but also take action without judgment and do all of that together.

And if you’re interested in joining the SPI community and you want to learn more and see how you can get involved, go to SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. We have several tiers that you could join at and different levels of access access to me and office hours and my team. And of course, this incredible community with thousands of people inside of it. And I want to invite you to be a part of it.

SmartPassiveIncome.com/community. And remember what we talked about today, we talked about the idea that there are just so many, an overwhelming number of choices that you can make. And so you need to make a choice and you need to commit to it. Stay in that lane. That outside noise. That’s just there to distract you and test you to see whether or not you are fully committed to seeing it through for a certain period of time to give it a real chance with the understanding that It’s not going to happen overnight. Countering combating this instant gratification culture that we’re in and also your isolation.

You need some structure around this and you need to find the productive strategies that work for you. Just in time information, a little foreshadowing of my book coming out in June called lean learning. So more on that later, but thank you for listening and hit that subscribe button. If you haven’t already, as you can tell, we’re taking a little bit more of a direct approach to how to serve you in your entrepreneurial endeavor this year here on the podcast.

So hit that subscribe button. We got more stuff that’s going to really, really help you move forward this year. And I’ll see you in the next episode.