One story that almost every entrepreneur has is that a lot of people doubted them early on.
Case in point…
When I graduated from Ohio State back in 2006, I was already making a few hundred dollars a month with affiliate marketing.
However…
I wasn’t treating it like a real business.
I just kind of did it in my spare time.
So I figured if I put more effort into it, I could make around $2,000 a month.
Which was enough for me to live on…
And even splurge on some Chipotle every week.
My thought was that “if worst comes to worst, I’ll get a job bartending to pay my bills”.
So going all-in on the affiliate stuff seemed like the right move to me…
However, my mother at the time did not agree.
She was insistent that I take the marketing job I had been offered at Rivals.com (this was a big college football recruiting website, and they wanted to pay me $45k a year).
It was a cool job…
And had good benefits…
But I knew I wanted to do my own thing.
And I knew that the best time to do it was then (when I didn’t have responsibilities like a kid or a family).
So when my mom kept harping on me to take the real job, I pushed back.
I told her I wanted to do my own thing.
And me being the naive 22 year-old that I was, I just assumed she would see it my way.
But that wasn’t the case.
She proceeded to lay a massive guilt trip on me…
“Your father and I worked so hard to send you to college, now you’re gonna throw it all away on this silly affiliate thing. I can’t believe you’d do this to us” she said.
I remember feeling like crap after she said this.
It struck deep.
And made me question everything…
But little did I know that her guilt trip was just the tip of the iceberg.
Cause her sadness around the whole thing quickly turned to anger…
She proceeded to tell me multiple times in no uncertain terms that if I did the affiliate thing, I was going to fail…
And that I’d be an embarrassment…
She harped on the fact that a bunch of my other friends were getting big name jobs at Deloitte…
And that I was stupid for not doing the same.
I remember feeling like a huge piece of shit after this.
This was my own mother…
The person who’s supposed to be encouraging me and supporting me when I need it most.
And here she was just telling me I’m gonna fail.
At the time, I just assumed she’d be a little more supportive of my dreams.
But that wasn’t the case.
And honestly it took a long time for her to really come around and realize that I knew what I was doing.
Those first few years where I was grinding out $20k-$30k years, she kept hounding me.
Everytime a friend of mine got a promotion…
Or she ran into someone at Kroger, she’d be calling me to tell me how my buddy Chris is now making $70k a year at Ford, and that I could be doing that.
It was non-stop.
However…
A few years down the road, when I had my first 6-figure year, she started to take a little notice.
And then later in 2015 I had an article written about me in Forbes and she couldn’t believe it.
In fact, she printed that damn thing out and paraded it around my hometown showing everyone she could.
And while it was nice to see her finally be proud of me, underneath that I held a lot of resentment from everything that lead up to that.
Cause she was never encouraging when I needed it the most.
She was always trying to knock me down…
And to get me to do what SHE wanted…
And that kind of brings me to the point of this email.
My story with my mom is not unusual among entrepreneurs.
It might not be your mom, but there’s probably people around you that don’t believe in you.
They think you’re crazy…
And that you need to stop screwing around with this “online thing”.
I can tell you this is very normal.
Most people just don’t get it.
So my advice?
You need to make decisions based on what YOU want.
Not what your parents want…
Not what your friends want…
And not what society wants for you…
It’s about what YOU want.
Cause the reality is, nearly all the people who are hating on you, and trying to discourage you, it really has nothing to do with you.
It’s all about what’s going on inside of them.
It’s about the fear and anxiety they feel…
It’s about them having control over you…
There’s a whole smorgasbord of shit going on inside them, and they’re unleashing it on you.
That’s the truth.
So listening to their advice is a bad idea.
And I know this can be hard, cause a lot of the time it comes from people that are close to you.
But you have to block out.
They’re free to say whatever they want…
But you don’t have to take it in.
Stay focused on what YOU want.
And you’ll be a lot better off in the years to come.
That’s all I got for ya this morning…
Enjoy your Friday,
– Justin
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Note: If you like the insights I share in my emails, you may be interested in working with me in my mentoring program.
You’ll get to learn from me, Stefan Georgi and a group of A-list copywriters every single day.
We’ve already helped hundreds of copywriters hit multiple 6-figures in income like Amber Peoples, Tanner Henkel, Mario Castelli, Scott Connorton, Michael Rochin, Scott Mills, Krista Edsall and more.
We’ve also helped offer owners like Troy Ericson, Steve Gunn, VShred, Scott Phillips and Conor Boyland to scale their offers to hundreds (and even thousands) of sales a day.
If you want to work with us, get feedback on your copy, and potentially 2-5x where you’re at now…
Then I suggest giving this a read and seeing if it’s for you…
-> Mentor under Justin & Stefan
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