Today I realized: I’m a loser and I have been my entire life!
I woke up early today and spent the morning at one of my apartment buildings putting up crown molding and window/door trim. After a productive morning I decided to enjoy a bit of the afternoon and go for a ride in the car I bought myself as a reward a couple of months ago.
Its not an expensive car, and in fact I bought it used. But I always wanted a little two seat, convertible, roadster so when I came across it this spring (it was a trade in at a local Corvette dealership) I decided to buy it for myself as a reward for working my tail off the last few years (and being responsible with the money I earned).
Today was a perfect day for a nice country ride. The weather was great, not to hot, not to cold, the sun was shining, and there was hardly a cloud in the sky. As I drove further and further into the country I started thinking about the things that led up to me being able to buy a toy car and decide to not work on a Wednesday afternoon and instead go for a joy ride. After a while I started thinking about my life in general and I came to a pretty stunning realization. I am a loser, and I have been one my entire life.
As far back as I can remember I have failed over and over at different things I have tried to do.
When I was a kid I was not particularly good in school. My grades where barely passable, I was irresponsible, and I often got into trouble. I have no doubt that there where very few people that felt I had much potential. I had a poor attitude, I hardly applied myself, and I was quite content with doing the minimal required of me.
As a young adult I was not much better. I did not go to university initially. I worked at shitty jobs. I drank a lot. I was irresponsible, unreliable and once again I did not apply myself to much of anything. I dated random girls but could not ever seem to get into a meaningful relationship. In short I did nothing productive at all in my late teens and early twenties.
In my mid twenties I settled down with one girl (who I would eventually marry) got a steady job (which I was not very good at) and started several offline business’s (a few I sold, most of them failed). By my early thirties I found myself divorced because I was not very good at being a husband. I lost control of one of my few profitable business’s, I lost my online source of income, and ended up living in my mom’s spare room. Then to top it off I wasted months of my life feeling sorry for myself and acting stupid.
As an internet marketer I initially made every single mistake I could possibly make. In fact there are to many to list but some of the biggest ones I made as to have a poor understanding of the market, to sell software for almost a year without even building a list from it, to telling a top marketer who wanted to connect with me (and partner with me) that he was trying to rip me off (fortunately I was able to fix that burned bridge later), and to make mistakes in my promotions that cost me tens of thousands of dollars. Yea I screwed up big time at first.
These are just a few things that I was thinking about as I was driving out in the country. Be assured if I listed all the times and ways I screwed up over the last 38 years this would be a massive article. Because of this your just going to have to take my word on it. Over and over in my life I have consistently screwed up, decided wrong, or flat out failed at things I have tried to do. Honestly as I was thinking about it I was kind of getting bummed out. It almost ruined my day, but then I started thinking about something else that made me even more happy than I initially was. I started thinking about Steel.
Yes Steel, the metal 🙂 .. this might sound stupid but its actually relevant. You see Steel is made from Iron. The way it is made is you put Iron into a blast furnace, heat it to God awfull temperatures ,add a little carbon, pull it out at the right time, pound the hell out of it, and repeat. When its all done the you have taken the brittle, weaker Iron and turned it into one of the strongest most useful metals in the world.
I realized that failure is like that. Failure is like the heat of the blast furnace, like the pounding hammer. I realized that although I have failed many times, although I have been a loser my entire life as I am getting older I fail less, I lose less. I realized that all of the things I have gone through, all of the screw ups , the mistakes I made, and that I still make are slowly improving me and making me better over time. Yes I lose now, but its not nearly as often as I did before. Yes I have been a loser my entire life, but I am ok with that, because every time I lose I begin to understand a little bit more about how to be a winner.
Its ok to fail and its ok to lose, in fact failing might be a requirement to winning, just so long as you learn from your failures, improve, grow, and become stronger and better than you where to start with. With that happy thought I finished my country drive and enjoyed the rest of the afternoon.
A quick note about the reviews I do on this site. The product vendors give me access to their products for free in order for me to do my review. However I make no promises to them regarding the results of my tests or what I will write in my review. Should you click a link that takes you to a sales page for a paid product for sale this link will be an affiliate link and I will be paid a percentage of the sales price should you decide to invest in it.
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Hey thank you for your honesty and insight, I too have failed at many so call projects and taken wrong the right path, but I have learned a lot in along the way. But I am glad that I found you because you tell it like it is, no fluff, no puff just the facts baby.
Man, you hit the nail on the head. Going through that myself right now. Trying to dig out of it. Thanks for the blog letting us know that we don’t have to be losers all our lives.
Thanks for sharing this Brett. I appreciate you peeling back a layer or two and revealing more of yourself to us. Like you (and others here), I can relate to making innumerable mistakes, failures, countless costly errors and all with a healthy side of distraction-itus and laziness. I’ve chased way too many blinking lights and download so much snake oil junk – half of which I never did anything with. I stumbled on one of Mike’s reviews of something who introduced me to you and your products and teaching. Your approach is believable and I sense you actually care about us out here who are now where you were not that long ago.
May you continue to reap the rewards of your more recent labors. May you feel genuinely blessed and deeply satisfied knowing that your straightforward teaching is helping many of us learn how to make money online like you have (I say this in faith as I haven’t hit pay dirt quite yet, but I’m still working at it). Thanks again.
Hi Brett
Very good post and the fact you have achieved what you have now, despite the setbacks makes you a winner. Losers are lifes no hopers who do not want to achieve in life or do not have the common sense to make the changes needed to get out of a rut.
Hey Brett,
It sounds like you’re talking about me. Thanks for the post.
Interesting! I’ve had the opposite experience. I’ve always been a winner. I got every job I ever wanted. And I always have to win when playing games with my family, especially if they were strategy games. I have a doctorate, which wasn’t particularly lucrative, but something I wanted to achieve. But, being a winner surely didn’t prepare me for Internet marketing. I know a lot of “stuff”, but was always afraid to plunge into something, at least until I “figured it out”. I guess I’ve always been afraid to fail, which is something I did very little of. Maybe that’s why I didn’t venture into the realm of chasing dreams. But that’s what I’m doing now. Wish me luck!
Brett
I can relate to what you are saying mate. Great read.
Never give up is another key to winning.
I agree with everything you said totally and I fell the same way. I have been struggling to built a business in affiliate marketing for about one and a half years. At the present, I am building landing pages for free products to give away to build a list. I have about 30 subscribers so far, but it seems to be moving so slowly. I am using “Landing Page Monkey” from Promote Labs and funneling everything through MailChimp. I seem to have a variety of quality free software, eBooks and plugins to give away and I have done practically everything to encourage them to subscribe, with the exception of “holding their hands”. Do you have any advice? Maybe you can spot what I am doing wrong.
Great Post Brett, It is tough when going through hell to put it in the proper perspective. Being self critical or even feeling down after achieving something great in most other people’s eyes has plagued me my whole life. The tough times though have always made me able to better withstand the harder stuff ahead. Marketing on the Internet in my experience is full of failure but I celebrate every time I make a commission and every time I get something right. Thanks for telling your story and for inspiring me to keep plugging forward.
Love your “failing your way to success” story, Brett. Love your courage in never giving up.
Abraham Lincoln failed countless times. In fact, he was a royal MASTER LOSER! He bankrupted businesses many times… lost every election he ran as a candidate… but he never gave up moving forward… despite all his losses… despite being a consummate loser… until one day he won the one thing that gave him the power to change all our worlds for the better.
When we write our own history, we never know how much our own losses will mean the world to someone else.
Like Lincoln, I hope you keep perfecting “how to lose.” It makes your wins so much more valuable to those who follow in your footsteps, Brett. 🙂
Great post! And one I can relate to really well…
I was not particularly good in school. My grades were barely passable, I was irresponsible, and I often got into trouble. I had a poor attitude, I hardly applied myself, and I was quite content with doing the minimal required of me. I did not go to university, I drank a lot.
By my early thirties I found myself divorced because I was not very good at being a husband. I lost my profitable business, my home and everything else and ended up living in a small pad above my parent’s office…
BUT… that which doesn’t kill us, makes us stronger!
A very ‘relateable’ post ! Thanks
I’m a massive loser as well. We are in good company; most men in modern society are in fact losers. We have no real talents or gifts, are repulsive or uninteresting to most women, and fail at just about every challenging endeavor we undertake. I could rattle off 100 failures and mistakes of mine in the past few months alone, but I am struggling to come up with even one significant accomplishment in the past 10 years. And note – this is not for lack of effort. I have worked and sacrificed significantly for decades to try to better myself, but the returns have always been poor. The so-called 10,000 hour rule of proficiency is not really true; you can’t really become elite unless you also have some inborn talent. With an IQ in the low-average range, there really is a limit to what I can achieve. If fact, I should be thankful that a dullard like myself can actually make a half-decent living. A century ago, I would have been a common, uneducated laborer with a life expectancy of 45.
Yet we keep plugging away for some reason. At some point though, I’m going to throw in the towel and end my absurd existence. That day will come when the suffering that I cause others by interacting with them is no longer outweighed by the small benefit that I bring to the world. For me, that probably means about 15 or so more years of life. Just enough to serve as a source of income for the kids until they are independent. At that point, I will probably be a truly incompetent worker who is just taking up space anyway. With no kids around and no job, I will drive the wife to distraction, if she hasn’t divorced me already. That will be me at about 60 – a jobless, single, useless person.
So about a decade and a half to go at most for this drudge. It’s actually liberating to set a timeframe on this loser existence – this might even make it bearable.