Every day you’re bombarded with the sight of winners (both real and fake).
All the YouTube videos on your homepage have hundreds of thousands of views. Everyone on X is posting revenue screenshots (most are fake btw), bragging about making more money in a month than you make in a year. Every SEO posts Ahrefs screenshots showing that they get 10x more traffic than you.
It feels like you’re the only one struggling.
“Maybe I don’t have what it takes. It’s so easy for everyone else, but it’s difficult for me. Might as well throw in the towel”.
The problem with this worldview is that what you see online is fake.
EVERYTHING ON THE INTERNET IS FAKE.
Most people agree with that statement in the abstract. But then they log on and immediately start thinking that what they see is real.
The vast majority of people struggle.
Most websites barely get any traffic. Most videos barely get any views. Most social media accounts barely get any followers.
It’s a grind for everyone.
No one is born destined for greatness. You have to earn it, every step of the way.
The people who are killing it today were just like you once. They felt like they had no chance, they felt ‘who am I to be successful, I’m a nobody.’ All the self-loathing and self-doubt is just something you have to go through on your way to the top.
The giants of today once had humble origins.
Take a look at Nerdwallet circa 2009:
If you randomly stumbled across a site that looked like this in the wild, you would never assume that it would ever make any money.
Yet it turned into one of the biggest personal finance affiliate sites in the world.
You have to have the ability to look at a piece of marble and see the statue within.
Once you have a vision of where you want to be, figuring out how to do it takes care of itself.
But only if you tune out the noise.
Most of the people running their mouths about how rich/successful they are on social media are either:
Lying
Trying to sell something (selling the dream)
Have weird psychological issues surrounding feelings of inadequacy that they’re projecting onto the interwebs at large
Since you’re reading this newsletter, you’re already in the top few IQ percentiles. You’ve already transcended past the level where you think that people posting pics in private jets on social media are real.
Now you have to realize that the same fake-flexing tendency exists even in the higher-IQ corners of the interwebs.
Instead of ‘look at my watch and all these hot chicks I’m hanging out with pls give me likes’ it turns into ‘look at my revenue numbers last month pls give me likes’.
Same same but different.
If you take it too seriously, you’ll get depressed and never do anything.
Cliches suck. But there is an element of truth to them. The age-old line ‘don’t compare yourself to others, compare yourself to past versions of yourself’ is actually solid advice (if a bit cringy).
As long as you’re improving, you’ll get there.
Limit the amount of social media BS that you take in. It’s not helping you. Focus on what you’re doing and how you can get to the next level instead of beating yourself up for not automatically being at the top by default.
It’s the only way.