The Slow Growth Approach & The Convenience Deception

So, what you are learning here today and what we will be talking about, are all methods that need to be practiced consistently. And one of the things that I feel strongly about is that the skill that you have to acquire in life is the skill of mastery. And what the skill of mastery is — you don’t have to acquire this but it is a very helpful skill to have. The skill of mastery is the ability to put your attention in one area for a set period of time, consistently. The things that you put your attention on in your life will grow, and the things that you ignore will go away. Yo! Austin and Chad, what’s up dudes? These guys are cool, they run an eCommerce podcast. The things that you put your attention on will grow.

So, if you put your attention on your business consistently, it will get bigger. If you ignore your significant relationships and your intimate relationships, they will get smaller and go away. So, the way that you get good at an instrument is just by playing it all the time consistently. And so, the slow growth approach is the same way. If you do these things consistently, you will get better at them. That’s what it takes. The sheer willpower to sit down, do something, see what happens, and then do it again. And sometimes you’ll be uncomfortable. It’s a little uncomfortable to do stuff that we’re not so great at right at the start, right? Like as humans, we’re attracted to things that we win at. We’re attracted to winning cycles. If we do well in an area, we want to keep doing it.

And so when we maybe have a failure . . . who here has had a failure? Right, yeah, you know if that happens, that’s okay. That’s part of it. That doesn’t mean that you’re bad or wrong, or you’ve done anything bad. Steven, you’re putting up two hands, bro [laughter]? Are you supposed to? So, you’ve got to be willing to embrace that feeling of being uncomfortable, because you will be a little uncomfortable when you’re growing your business.

Now, there’s this deception that people will try to sell you on, of convenience. “Quick, run this affiliate marketing offer and make money fast.” Or, “Let’s build our whole business on someone else’s platform, Amazon.” Like there’s all these different, easy ways to do things. But it’s a deception because if your whole business is based on Amazon, it can very easily be taken away from you on Amazon, which is why we’re going to talk a lot at this conference about moving away from Amazon, although we will talk about Amazon marketing strategies and how to grow our business on Amazon and stuff like that. Because it’s very important to take advantage of those, but we also have to have attention on what’s beyond the easy, what’s beyond what’s easy now, and that’s the convenience exception.