Success Hangover - How To Actually Plan For Success
From the Edge of David
Subj: Stay gritty and disciplined
I get asked the same question constantly.
“David, please help! I don’t want to do A, I want to do B. But my family wants me to do A. What should I do?“.
You should stop being a cowardly Lion, that’s what you should do.
If you know what you want to do, what you need to do, but you run away from it; you are a coward and a quitter.
“But but but but but but but but but but but….”
But nothing.
If I wanted to hear about “ifs and buts” and candies and nuts I would have started Boring & Predictable – The Website for Mids.
But I didn’t, I started Edge of David – Find Your Edge, Enjoy Life.
So do one very important thing, let the winner out (pretty please for me?). Stop resisting. If it’s your fate to be great then do it.
Your friends and family will either support you or they won’t. The ones who resist you (the majority) are saboteurs out to stop you from real success.
They want you to succeed, just on their terms and not yours.
If you can do it and they can’t, well, that’s a real nasty thought for them to think about as you’ll pull out ahead and have access to a life they don’t
So how do you convince your friends and family that you will succeed and be a big success and that they should believe in you?
You don’t convince them of anything. You should never conspire with saboteurs and you should never seek approval from people who are irrelevant to your success.
Your friends and family aren’t on the same wavelength as you and they are not the real enemy to success. It is not them that need to be convinced.
It is you who needs to convince yourself.
An unbreakable resolve and an iron will is worth more than 10,000 well-wishers. Support is irrelevant if you don’t even believe in yourself beyond reason.
Do you know what it’s called to resist your calling in life? It’s called self-sabotage. When you resist you are sabotaging yourself. You’re a damn traitor to yourself.
Your punishment as a traitor is more severe than Judas’ or Brutus’. Your punishment, as a traitor to yourself, is to live your whole life doing a job you hate and asking yourself the same question, teary eyed at night when no one else can see, “what if?“.
Oh, if only you had done as you were supposed to. If only you hadn’t ran from your destiny. If only you weren’t a self-saboteur who conspired with other saboteurs against yourself.
“If only, if only, if only, boo-hoo“.
Good news, no matter how old you are and no matter how many times you have turned your back on success it is not too late.
When you make the change you will only have one regret: “I should have done this sooner. My god, why did I wait so long?“.
After you’re done feeling sorry for yourself, you can pick yourself up, dust yourself off and say these words: I can do it, I will do it and no one will stop me.
Instead of being a self-saboteur, become self-sufficient. Unbreakable in your resolve.
It’s OK to be scared, everyone is scared, even I was scared starting out thinking is this really going to work. Now I’m not afraid 10 people will watch my videos or read my site, I’m afraid a million people will.
The more successful you are the stronger the fear becomes. People will sabotage themselves so they don’t have to feel the fear anymore. Fear stops cowards and fear powers winners.
When you’re successful everything is on the line, all eyes are on you and they’re all praying for you to fail. It’s easy to give them what they want, another failure. When you’re a failure, nothing is on the line and there is no more pressure.
It’s not the absence of fear that makes you great. It’s action in the face of that fear that makes you great.
No one is really afraid of failing to be honest
Failing is easy and everybody does it. Nobody will hate you for failing. They will hate you for succeeding where they have failed.
Nobody wants to be hated, nobody wants to work hard, nobody wants to think they are better than others, nobody wants to make a big change, nobody wants mounting pressures.
It’s easier to just stay small.
It’s easier to procrastinate and pretend you are going to do something big “later“. It’s easier to just be regular and fit in with regular Joe and Joanna.
It’s easier, when you’re on the cusp of success, staring it down, to just turn your back and walk away.
When you fail you get to stay the same, no change required, and staying the same is what your animal brain wants, not your soul.
“The higher you climb the harder you fall. It’s lonely at the top. You don’t deserve success when other people are struggling.”
On and on the excuses. Hey, if that’s the way you feel you can just stay the same. It’s a guarantee that no one will despise you for not succeeding and not everybody was meant for more.
But…
If you’re better than that you have to fight through that feeling of fear. Stop the procrastination and excuses for 30 days. Then extend it 30 more days. And 30 more. And on and on and on and on and on…
…and on and on and on…..
And just don’t damn stop. All the way from A to Z.
⚡Transform your reality today⚡
Common self-sabotage techniques once you “make it”
Once you finally breakthrough and have built something that works, don’t let the self sabotage creep in. These are the bad behaviors that will do you in if you’re not careful.
You stop doing what is works!
Don’t let off the proverbial gas pedal once things are going well, do more of what is working to drive attention, traffic and sales. Once you’re doing well, it’s not time to goof off and relax.
Keep publishing books, videos, courses, emails, blog posts, sending out proposals, running ads – whatever is driving your attention and sales.
I was so, so productive in Vietnam. Had a great relationship (a good woman is a huge life hack), was disciplined and consistent and started making over 10k a month.
But once I moved to Thailand in 2022, everything started to crumble. I stopped doing the maintenance work of what got me to where I'm at, which was making vids, earning good ad revenue and driving sales of software tools as an affiliate.
Google also changed their algorithm and the rise of AI crushed my niche site on teaching online. It still makes me $100 a month, but that's down from $1000 a month and $8000 during back to school (yea, I made $8000 a month from Amazon Associates during back to school in July and August).
The gritty life I had when I first went to Vietnam in 2019 was better. I was focused and disciplined, gym, freelance work, spending time with my then GF, making videos, cutting deals for affiliate promotions.
If I had just stayed the course I should be waking up a married man now, with a kid or two. Living in Vietnam on a marriage visa, having a studio to record in and a few staff members to help me.
I should have leveled up. But I broke up with my girl, went home to the USA for 8 months, then moved to Thailand.
I now wish I stayed in Bangkok for only 1 year (not 3 like I did). If I got back to being the "me" in Vietnam if that makes any sense, I would be doing so well now.
I maybe would be making 30k+ a month. More importantly, I would have kept my dignity, self respect and discipline.
The girls, the trips, the nights out and the attention, it was all stimulating but empty. Fine for a season, but not no longer than that.
I do think it's useful for men to sow their oats, to live that life a bit, get it out of your system, but Bangkok is a bit of a black hole.
The real fun is in the discipline and living correctly, that's why we admire people - because they're demonstrating a correct way of being.
Fun is only real when it still feels good in hindsight. That’s the problem with degeneracy like hook up culture and clubs: It's fun when it's new, but later if that what your life becomes about, you feel hollow and pointless.
Like all drugs. Getting that dopamine hit at the expense of what's good for you long term.
What got you here, won’t get you there
You must constantly be building your skill stack until you’re net worth is SO big, the money your money makes pays for your living expenses.
That’s when you’ve won the game.
You won’t get there if you don’t do new things and learn new skills. What got you to 6k a month, won’t get you to 100k a month.
You have to learn new skills like hiring people, running ads, creating things to sell. The uncomfortable stuff. You may even just need to outright leave your home to get around a higher caliber of people.
Enjoying your free time a bit too much
I already touched on this, but the great thing about not having a job is the flexibility with your time. Yes, you can go for a nice long lunch on a Wednesday, or sleep in on a Monday when you’re not feeling well.
But if you stop working, things are going to start falling apart. This ties into the whole “stop doing what works” a bit, but it’s when you’re making a few thousands hands off each month and instead of building and growing, you spend your time having doing little of what anyone would call work.
The your income follows by ticking down little by little each month. You won’t care when it drops 12k to 9k, but keep going all of a sudden you’re back to making 1-3k a month?
Whoa what happened?
Not setting new goals
You need a goal, a finish line, something to work towards. This helps focus your thoughts and actions. Once you achieve a big goal, you may actually find yourself depressed and lost as you don’t know what to do next.
When you beat the main quest so to speak, “what’s next” will fill that void in the form of degenerate activities.
You combat this by forming new goals to get to a new level at their are tiers to income, status and success.
Shiny object syndrome
Shiny object syndrome is say NO to opportunities that are a great idea and will most likely work (not ideas that are dumb or irrelevant) but are a straight up distraction.
Staying focused on the main thing, and keeping the main thing, well… the main thing is mission critical.
Don’t dilute your attention, just do less, not more.
Burnout
You’ll need systems in place to prevent burn out. If you’re just working nonstop doing everything yourself you will hit burnout if you don’t pace yourself and setup systems everything can fall back on.
Bring on freelance help as needed. Setup a process for content production, make time for product creation. Systems keep everything running without you being overwhelmed.
Keep the ego in check
One of my favorite bloggers back in the day was Everett Bouge who blogged at farbeyondthestarts.com.
His writing was great, was one of the first to discover that “minimalism” was a very popular topic people loved and was just overall very helpful and responsive via email and then Twitter.
He even even launched his first ebook and gave it away for free and then a discounted rate so he could get feedback.
But as his traffic grew and grew, his sales increased and so did his ego where he started referring to himself as an “internet business expert” and actually charged people to email him.
In short, he started alienating his audience and dismissing people simply because they did not have a big blog audience. He then pivoted away from minimalism (see stop doing what works) and 301 redirect his old blog to his personal site.
Destroying a once thriving website and business into obscurity
You run a blog and sell ebooks and make 8-12k a month. That’s great and impressive but in the grand scheme of things you’re not hot shit. You’re not some genius business person.
Keep your ego in check to stay grounded. You want helpful feedback, not cheerleaders and remember their are tiers to this and someone is doing better than you. Stay humble and serve your audience.
Final words
Prepare for success by not self sabotaging yourself once you have your breakthrough moment.
One of the most transformational books/audible books I’ve come across is “Reality Transurfing” by Vadim Zeland.
It’s a powerful tool for help you create success and change your life for the better. It’s help me reach goals I though impossible, maybe it will help you?
All the best,
-David