How Your Ego Prevents You From Making Money
Don't let it happen to you
We live in a world where everyone has Main Character Syndrome.
There are lots of reasons for this.
Algorithms that are tailored to you and your interests making you think that the outer world should do same. Your social media following making you feel like you’re a celebrity. A general inability to cope with the pace of the modern world leading to you retreating into yourself.
Whatever it is, you have to be honest with yourself and admit your own tendencies towards narcissism.
Refusing to reply to legitimate emails
I’m sure you’ve noticed the decline in customer service from the consumer POV.
First you have to fight with an AI to let you talk to a human.
Then when you finally get a person on the phone, you have to tiptoe around their ego because if they get offended they won’t help you.
“Ser ser I’m going to need you to calm down” vibes.
And that’s on top of the normal feeling you get when talking to anyone who works in any capacity in any type of bureaucracy, i.e. the feeling of talking to a brick wall.
But when you’re on the other side of the equation (with your own business and talking to customers) you find yourself doing the same thing.
You get annoyed and ignore them because it feels like they’re taking up your ‘valuable time and energy’.
The result is missed sales, chargebacks, and negative reviews.
If you can respond to customers, you should.
One of the advantages of being small (and there are very few) is that you can actually give personalized attention to people.
Obviously I’m not talking about clinically insane people and trolls.
But if you get the vibe that someone is being legit, it doesn’t hurt to give them a good experience.
Even if their question is semi- or fully retarded.
Who cares?
Make their day. It doesn’t take anything away from you unless you’re a total egomaniac.
Refusing to do outreach
Doing outreach makes you feel small.
You get ghosted nonstop. You get angry replies from people telling you to fuck off. A 1% success rate is considered good.
Most people can’t handle the rejection, so they don’t even try.
I can’t tell you how many times I look at someone’s website and they haven’t built a backlink in six months.
I ask them ‘why?’ and get responses like ‘hurr durr I don’t know what I’m doing durrrr’. Then I ask ‘ok what techniques have you been trying?’ and it turns out they haven’t tried anything.
If you’re too scared to ask for links you aren’t going to get anywhere in the SEO game.
And this applies to everything.
If any time you know that contacting someone is the optimal move but you shirk away out of fear…you’re telling the world that you care more about your ego than you do about making money.
Not even starting to begin with
Ego issues crush many people before they even step up to the starting line.
This is the realm of the perma-wantrapreneur.
Sitting in your cocoon of safety and fantasizing about how successful you ‘would be’ if you started something feels better than actually sticking your neck out there and trying for real.
It’s impossible to accomplish anything worth accomplishing without exposing yourself to the possibility of failure.
And by possibility I actually mean certainty.
Even if (and it’s a big IF) your first business succeeds, your ego will die a million times at the micro- and macro-failures you experience along the way.
That’s a fancy way of saying you’re going to do some dumb shit as a first time entrepreneur. A lot of it.
The only way to avoid the mistakes is to put them behind you and treat them as learning experiences. But that’ll never happen until you stop protecting your ego with the stupid fantasies and actually DO SOMETHING.