Editor’s note: This article was first published in January 2016. Hardy’s story is told as of then, including “about six months ago”, a goal of 5,000 subscribers by the end of 2015 and his studies in industrial psychology, and the outlets he wrote for are those listed at the time.
Some things take time. That’s true. But it’s also true that we can cut down the time it takes to reach our goal. To show how, we’ll use the story of Benjamin Hardy, a young man studying industrial psychology who has already achieved what others told him would take years.
And along the way, we’ll repeat something we’ve said many times before: once you know exactly what you want, it’s much easier to get there.
Hardy says that about six months ago he managed to become a professional writer. Until then he had written an e-book, but he wanted to publish the traditional way, even though he wasn’t known and didn’t yet have any online presence.
As soon as he knew what he wanted to do, he got in touch with the people best placed to advise him: literary agents. He spoke to 10 different agents and all of them turned him down because, as he explains, publishers now expect new writers to have at least a platform where people know them: a website, a blog. In short, and perhaps understandably, publishers want to be sure that the new writer already has readers, so that at least a few people will buy the book.
Optimistic, Hardy told them he had just launched his site Benjaminhardy.com and that his goal was to reach 5,000 subscribers by the end of 2015. One publisher told him that starting from zero it wouldn’t be possible, because these things take time. He was told that he wouldn’t be able to get anyone interested in publishing a book of his for at least three to five years.
Hardy remembers thinking, as they hung up on him: “Not possible… for whom?”
In the end he reached his goal in less than 12 months, and today Hardy is also known for his articles in various outlets, including Business Insider, TIME magazine, Psychology Today and the Huffington Post.
Never ask advice from someone you wouldn’t want to trade places with
This idea appears in The Compound Effect by Darren Hardy. I don’t subscribe to the message “those who can’t do, teach”, because by that logic no business owner would hire a manager, since the manager would be running a company without having a clue about business, never having started one.
But if we look closely at the quote, we do find several truths. Anyone can give you advice, and not all advice will be good. If you ask a sexist man how to win a woman over, his advice will be very different from what a hopeless romantic would tell you. So we should ask ourselves the underlying question: “Would I like to be like this person?”
By the same token, advice isn’t invalid just because the person giving it doesn’t practise what they preach. The first person who told me not to smoke was a doctor with a cigarette in his mouth, and that doesn’t make the advice any less valid.
Why do you need to know what you really want?
As Ryan Holiday puts it, a fundamental irony is that most people don’t really know what they want to do with their lives, and yet they are very busy.
Most young people go to university with no idea why they’re there. They’ve simply been told to get a degree or they’ll never amount to anything. Then they finish their degree, and many of them know they’re now somebody, but they don’t know exactly who.
If you’ve never stopped to think about what you want to do in life, how will you tell good advice from bad? Where does one piece of advice take you, and where does another? As the saying goes, no wind is favourable for a ship that doesn’t know which port it’s heading for.
Meanwhile, people who know exactly what they want see the world differently. In fact, they experience the frequency illusion, but in a positive way. Just as when you buy a SEAT Ibiza you start seeing SEAT Ibizas everywhere (not because there are suddenly more of them), when you know where you’re heading you start noticing many more of the things that actually matter in helping you reach that goal.
When you start paying attention to your surroundings, that’s when you start to thrive.
How to achieve your 10-year plan in the next 6 months
In his book Zero to One, Peter Thiel basically suggested that there are different paths to what we want: a long conventional path and other, shorter ones. The conventional path is the result of not paying attention, or of letting other people dictate which steps to take and which road to follow.
There are simple solutions (though they still require a lot of dedication) for doing in a few months what would have taken us many years along the conventional path.
“When the student is ready, the teacher appears.” – Mabel Collins
Even when it comes to acquiring a skill or mastering a particular field, we can gain 10 years of experience in a few months. In our article How long it takes to master a skill, we discussed how Tony Robbins became one of the most influential speakers in the world in record time.
Robbins said he decided to speak in public three times a day, while the norm for other speakers was 48 talks a year. That practice and constant repetition allowed him to build up more than a year’s experience in just two weeks.
At other times, it’s easier to pay for a course or buy the books you need to acquire knowledge that took other people months or years to gather.
Today the world moves at a dizzying pace, and the business world is no different. You can quickly test which product might sell and, if it doesn’t work, move on to another just as quickly, without investing more than necessary.
As a general rule, though, the only problem is that we know we want to do something, but sometimes we don’t know what, and when we do know, we never quite take the first step (procrastination).
Opportunities
You have to stay alert to seize the opportunities that come your way. Of course, we’ll have to say “yes” to many things, but we’ll also have to say “no” to many others. And the question here is: “If you don’t know what you want to do, how will you know which opportunities to accept and which to turn down?”
As Jim Collins says, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity may be irrelevant if it’s the wrong opportunity. Sometimes there’s nothing worse than devoting our time and energy to something we really shouldn’t have started, because it’s a waste of energy that has only taken time away from the things we should be doing.
See also: James Altucher’s advice to young people on achieving financial success
Featured image: Ian Petticrew, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
