Learning to make money online can be a challenging game, but you can win it if you can persist.
As an NBA player Michael Jordan missed more than 9,000 shots and lost almost 300 games. He was an atrocious 3-point shooter. He was trusted to take the game winning shot 26 times… and missed. He’s also considered to be the greatest basketball player in the history of the world.
Michael Jordan once famously said, “I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. That’s why I succeed.”
Another famous failure, Abraham Lincoln, once wrote, “I am now the most miserable man living. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on the earth.” This was penned after he:
- Went to war as a captain and returned as a private
- Failed in business and as a lawyer
- Was defeated repeatedly in politics (he couldn’t get into the Legislature, Congress or Senate)
- Had his application to be Commissioner of the General Land Office rejected
- Failed to gain a VP nomination.
Of course he also went on to become the 16th President of the United States and held the Union together through its bloody civil war.
You Can Make Money Online (As Long As You Don’t Quit)
“It is our duty as human beings to proceed as though the limits of our capabilities do not exists.”
Teilhard de Chardin
What’s the biggest thing you’re struggling with in your efforts to make money online?
There seem to be so many people on the forums who are genuinely keen to become successful internet marketers, but they just never seem to move off first base.
Is this you?
What’s stopping you from making money online?
Do you worry about what to do?
(Don’t – you have all the information in the world available to you – I mean seriously, there is nothing you can’t learn simply by searching the forums, blogs and products available.)
Are you worried about starting a blog?
(Don’t – there’s an endless amount of information about everything from coding to WordPress to content creation.)
Worried about picking a niche?
(Don’t be – there are thousands of things that millions of people are genuinely interested in and are willing to pay good money to buy good information about.)
Can’t work out the semantics of creating a marketing funnel?
(Seriously – I can’t tell you how many webpages exist that explain this in great detail.)
Listbuilding, creating landing pages, squeeze pages, autoresponders, paid traffic, free traffic, product creation, product launches, JVs?
It’s all out there.
The thing is, none of these problems is YOUR problem.
Your problem isn’t a lack of information. Your problem (and the biggest roadblock for 99% of people who want to make money online from internet marketing) is that you give up before you’ve mastered the things you’ve learned.
Your problem is that you’re a quitter!
Sorry, but it’s true.
I know you’ve made a start (probably a lot of starts), but you’ve quit when it came time to put your blood, sweat and tears into your business. You’ve given up when the going got tough; when the time for commitment arrived. You’ve thrown in the towel when faced with the risk of failure, the risk of frustration, the risk of criticism, the risk of wasting months of effort or $100s or $1,000s.
You’ve said enough when faced with the risk of sacrifice or even the risk of life changing success!
The good news is that you CAN make money online – lots and lots of money. You CAN be a success. You CAN achieve your dream… if you learn to persist.
It’s as simple as that.
The Science of Persistence
On 6 May 1954 Roger Bannister ran a mile in 3:59.4. Previous to this no one had ever run a mile in under four minutes before.
The 4 minute mile had been a goal for middle distance runners for years, but despite everything anyone could think of, no body had ever achieved it. In fact, scientists had even suggested it was something that may have been physically impossible for a human being.
The funny thing is, once the news of Bannister’s run started to spread, it wasn’t long before more and more people were doing the impossible.
This is one of my favorite stories of achievement and illustrates perfectly both the reason you’re not making money online and also the solution to your problem.
If you can learn how to persist then you can succeed.
If you can persist then you can learn any aspect of the internet marketing game and make money online.
If you can persist long enough, you can even make a lot of money.
But if you can’t persist – if you’re someone who’s been jumping around from one niche/guru/method to another – then let me school you on the science of persistence. This is probably the most powerful thing I’ve ever learned.
The science of persistence is called ‘self-efficacy‘. It’s a theory that was pioneered by psychologist Alfred Bandura.
I’m not a very scientific minded person, so the name ‘self-efficacy’ sometimes makes me scratch my head. I simply like to refer to this theory as ‘You can do it!‘
Self-efficacy is the belief that you can succeed at something. It’s a measure of how long you’ll stick with something in order to master it. It can be applied to any kind of activity: losing weight, gaining muscle, quitting smoking, building a house and of course, making money. Self-efficacy is the power to face challenges competently and make the choice to keep going when the going gets tough. It’s something you can draw on when things aren’t going as well as you hoped they would.
People with a high level of self-efficacy are more likely to view challenging tasks as things to be mastered rather than things to be avoided. On the other hand, low self-efficacy makes you believe that something is harder than it actually is, even impossible.
Low self-efficacy leads to poor planning, high stress, erratic and unpredictable behavior (like jumping from one method, niche, product and guru to another). It also leads to discouragement and giving up.
High self-efficacy – or ‘You can do it! – leads to mastery.
There are 4 key elements of self-efficacy:
- Experiencing success – nothing raises or lowers self-efficacy faster than experiencing success or failure.
- Vicariously experiencing success – just by seeing someone succeed you can raise your self efficacy
- Social persuasion – encouragement increases self-efficacy while discouragement decreases it
- Psychological factors – stress and anxiety can lower self-efficacy.
Self efficacy is more than confidence.
Confidence is a colloquial, non-specific catchword that refers to strength of belief, but doesn’t specify what that certainty is about (for example, you can be supremely confident that you will fail at something).
Self-efficacy is a belief in one’s ability to succeed only – it is both an affirmation of capability and a measure of the strength of one’s belief.
It’s important to understand self-efficacy because it’s not the number of skills you have, but what you believe you can do with what you have under a variety of situations.
If you can develop more self-efficacy then you can use it to overcome any of the roadblocks that are keeping you from achieving your goals and ambitions.
But developing self-efficacy isn’t easy. It takes time and commitment and patience and above all, desire.
Do you want it?
Is it what you need to get ahead in the internet marketing game?
Then here’s a quick game plan to put you on the path to developing more self-efficacy and achieving more success:
- Identify a problem
- Determine how capable you are at solving the problem
- Believe you can overcome it
- Search for someone who has overcome it and model your actions on theirs.
- Break down the task into smaller tasks.
- Encourage yourself continually.
- Celebrate every small success before moving on to the next challenge.
If you can follow this simple road map then your self-efficacy will start to grow with each challenge you overcome. You’ll start to realize that ‘you can do it’. Then you can use the growing power within you to overcome bigger and harder challenges. It’ll be like a snowball gathering momentum down a mountainside until there’s an avalanche of belief behind everything you do.
You’ll be unstoppable.
The thing is, if you want to make money online and become the kind of success you dream of becoming, you simply need to persist.
It’s as simple as that.
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