The Downside of Elevating Your Lifestyle
Common trap you WILL fall into
One of the most common pitfalls I see people fall into is elevating their lifestyle after a good month or two.
It’s a trap that’s almost impossible to avoid. And the consequences are devastating.
Why it happens
Starting a business is a grind.
Everyone understands they will have to go through a Struggle Stage.
What no one expects is how long it lasts.
Your initial hopes of being one of the exceptions who instantly becomes rich with zero effort fade away, replaced by the exact opposite feeling: total despair.
Success seems impossible. It’s not even a pipe-dream. The idea that your stupid little business will ever take off is a joke that’s so bad that you laugh not because it’s funny but because the very premise is so utterly ridiculous.
Maybe you’ll make “beer money” or just enough to keep the lights on, but massive success?
That’s for other people.
Until one day it happens.
Maybe you catch a good algorithm update. Maybe it’s just the result of your cumulative efforts paying off (gradually then suddenly). Maybe the gods are smiling on you.
Whatever the reason is, you start making money.
A fuckton of it.
Finally all the years of depression and grinding have paid off.
And I don’t just mean financially.
The monetary rewards are really just a proxy for the REAL reward, which is emotional.
It’s the feeling that you’ve finally arrived. The grind-and-depression phase hasn’t just paid off…
It’s over.
You’ve finally ascended to the next level. You never have to struggle ever again.
It’s all first class tickets, fine dining, and five star hotels for you.
Because the money is going to keep rolling in forever.
You're now a Successful Business Owner. Part of the jet set. A cut above the teeming, sweaty, hard-working masses who will never know how the other half (i.e. you) lives.
What happens next
But the Universe has a way of humbling you.
The problem with the WiFi money lifestyle is that it’s like riding a rollercoaster while blindfolded.
Your best month ever can be followed by your worst month ever. All your gains can be taken away from you in the blink of an eye.
It’s the Universe’s way of testing you to see if you’re one of the Real Ones.
You can get to the level where you’re essentially permanently successful, but you have to suffer first.
And part of the way the Universe makes you suffer is by giving you a taste of the way things could be…right before it rips it all away from you.
You advance a few levels and then drop right back to where you were.
Unlike before (during the Eternal Grind Stage of the true beginner), you now know what you’re missing out on because you’ve (briefly) lived it.
Going back to suffering and working hard for no money when you’ve felt how things could be is a total nightmare.
It’s one of the ‘dropping-off points’ where tons of people throw in the towel for good.
The re-humbling process CRUSHES people. They retreat back to the corporate world with their tail between their legs, begging for a life of stability.
But some people get a taste of how things could be and it motivates them to get back to (and even surpass) that level.
If you can push through it then you’ll know for a fact that you’re one of the Real Ones.
You can’t just decide that you’re going to be like this in advance. It’s easy to simply declare that you’ll never quit when you’ve never suffered. It’s only when you actually feel the pain that you get to really decide which type of person you want to be.
Which one are you?