E372: I meet a lot of people obsessed with get-rich-quick schemes and shortcuts.
Something, however, I see time and time again is that the most surefire way to achieve one’s goals is to take the longcut.
This means doing something one enjoys and sticking with it daily (or several times a week) - for years.
Nobody is so dumb they won’t figure things out given enough time.
But when you go from “opportunity” to “opportunity” you have to start anew each time.
This episode is my rant on this.
I give an example of a friend who built a company streaming music for pets on YouTube. He built it for 10 years with no outside funding and sold it for tens of millions of dollars.
I give the example of myself - one year ago I was plateauing and almost gave up. But I believed if I stuck with it, I would figure it out.
And I give a cautionary tale of a founder who was too eager to get to goals quickly, raised a bunch of money without doing proper due diligence, and got nothing when the company he worked for years to build was acquired.
Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.
Take the longcut.
My social media posting strategy (as mentioned in the episode): https://edwardsturm.com/articles/social-media-posting-strategy/
00:00 Persistence 00:04 A Friend's Success Story 02:04 The Reality 02:21 The Longcut vs. Shortcuts 04:25 Lessons from The Terminal List 07:41 My Social Media Journey 11:35 Sticking with It 13:44 Conclusion
#entrepreneurship #persistence #motivation #consistency
The Edward Show. Your daily content marketing podcast: https://edwardsturm.com/the-edward-show/
This episode is about how people are so quick to give up. I wanna start with an example, I have a friend. This friend started a company streaming music for pets on YouTube. He started it, I think, 12 years ago. And 12 years ago, imagine going to like your parents or your friends and going, I'm gonna make a company where I stream music for people's pets on YouTube. I play music for people's pets on YouTube. I'm gonna make this company and sell it for tens of millions of dollars. I'm gonna make this company, it's gonna be so successful that within several years of starting it, I'll be able to buy Rolexes and apartments in London and go to the Knights of Social Clubs and then ultimately sell the company for tens of millions of dollars, streaming music for pets on YouTube. And imagine going to your friends and your family, 12 years ago, saying that you were gonna do that. What would the results be? These people would probably laugh at you. Maybe you have great parents and great friends, hopefully they wouldn't laugh at you. But like the average person 12 years ago, that would be so far out of anybody's reality, that they would be like, all right, good luck with that. And this person, my friend, did this. Of course he did this, that's why I'm telling the story. This person started this company. I'm not gonna say the person or the company because I don't know if he would want me sharing with it, he sold it for tens of millions of dollars. But I'm gonna try to get him on the podcast to actually talk about it. I met this guy, I was living in Kiev. We were both living in Kiev during lockdowns in Ukraine. We were living in Kiev Ukraine during lockdowns. And I met him at a cafe 'cause he was admiring my watch. He loves watches and he liked one of the watches that I was wearing. And we started talking and then it turned out that we had all these mutual friends. And so we became friends. We hung out all the time in Kiev, then we hung out in New York City. I think we hung out in a different country too, I forget, but he visited me in New York a few times and we hung out, I met him, I met his business partners. I met other people in the holding company that acquired his company. And he's someone who I would say is a good friend. And 12 years ago, he started a company streaming music for pets on YouTube. And let me say it wasn't easy. It wasn't immediate success. It wasn't immediate, crazy virality. There was a little bit of success, but he had to keep at it. The dude had to keep going. And I say this because a lot of people, they're always looking for shortcut opportunities. These like get rich quick schemes. So many people are just looking for those and they don't realize that if they just used all the time that they spend looking for shortcuts and instead take the long cut, they'd be better off. And it's something that it took me a while to realize, but I see it from so many other people. I see it from so many others and I'm like, stop. Slow down, just pick something and stick with it. It's not often that people get something the first time. In fact, it's very rare. It's so rare getting something the first time that you should just understand that it takes, and this isn't me saying this to you, this is me saying it to the people who I meet, who are jumping all over the place, trying to find the get rich quick scheme, that if they just picked one thing and stuck with that one thing, anything can be a crazy lucrative opportunity, a crazy monetary opportunity. But oftentimes, it takes a bit of time to figure it out, in fact, way more time than you think. And I saw that from my friend because he kept at it for years, making changes here, making changes here, optimizing flows here, figuring out content that worked, figuring out content that didn't work, figuring out thumbnails, figuring out titles, figuring out how to actually make money off people, figuring out who to get his sponsors. He didn't take funding either. Something that I like about him is he is trying to start this like no funding movement. He is trying to say like, look, look what I did, you don't need funding to do this. There's this huge misconception in startups that people need funding to have crazy exits. Personally, I think that's nonsense. But I know so many people who are brainwashed by that mentality, by the mentality that they need to get funding in order to have a crazy exit, when in fact, they do not. What they really need is time. They need to be, they need to have the time to be able to stick with something and figure it out. Because like I said, it takes way more time than people think it's going to take. But you do get there. There's a saying, I got the saying, I'm reading this series about Navy Seals. It's called the Terminal List series. I just got onto book four of the series. I've been binging this book. I started when I had a flight to New York a few weeks ago. I was going back to New York at a long transatlantic flight. I got this book, The Terminal List, because I heard the author on the My First Million podcast. It's an amazing book. It's Revenge Porn about a Navy Seal who wants to get back at all the corrupt people in government who killed his seal squad and who killed his family and he wants to get revenge. And it's like, if you feel angered at people in government who are corrupt, this is Revenge Porn against those people. And it's also just super well written. It's a great book. Oh, and this series was so popular. So successful that it was very quickly turned into a TV series on Amazon starring Chris Pratt. And Chris Pratt is a huge fan of the books. He's like, can I start in this? So one of the things that the protagonist in this book says, when the protagonist is going and doing all these missions, he says, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I'm gonna repeat that 'cause I like it so much. I wrote it down for myself and I wanted to talk about it on the show. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. And this applies directly to what I'm saying. Going fast in startups and business and marketing is looking for the shortcuts. That is what going fast is. But the thing is people spend so much time looking for these shortcuts that if they had taken that time and just worked on figuring out what worked on a certain business and what didn't and then optimizing and then expanding, they would have been way better off. They'd make way more money. They grow way more, slow is smooth, smooth is fast. You're way more likely to get to your goals sooner if you don't look for constant shortcuts. So like my friend, my friend just said, I'm gonna stick with this business and it wasn't immediate success, but he stuck with it, had a great exit. I know someone who got hundreds of millions of dollars in funding got totally effed over by his investors, super brilliant entrepreneur, but just didn't know anything when he was raising capital because he was new, got all this money, worked for all these years. By the time he exited, the only money that he'd made was from his salary. He got nothing from the exit because he didn't understand what he was signing when he got the term sheets. Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. I went on a podcast yesterday after recording yesterday's podcast about LinkedIn Parasite SEO. That was a great podcast yesterday. I talked about doing Parasite SEO with LinkedIn Pulse, how people are using LinkedIn Pulse to rank for keywords. That's a shortcut. And that's a shortcut that might not last, but it is a shortcut. And I talk about exactly how to do it. There are safe ways to do it, non-safe ways to do it. There are ways that actually have longevity, which I mentioned in ways that don't. Real fast, the way to do it that has longevity is to use your personal account and not do it in spammy ways. Target keywords, don't use AI-generated text, actually create something of value, get engagement, use your keyword properly, keyword in the title, keyword in the first sentence, keyword throughout the post, make a post over 2,000 words. That's how you would do it and then it'll rank for years and you're not gonna get in trouble for doing that. That is the longevity way. But after I recorded this podcast about this, I went on another podcast and I shared something that not a lot of people know. A year ago, right before I started this podcast, my daily podcast, The Edward Show, right before I started it, I was plateauing on TikTok. Should make a whole episode just about this. I was plateauing on TikTok and I hadn't yet figured out Instagram and I was considering giving up, but I had this belief, nobody is so stupid that if they keep it something every day for years, they're not going to figure it out. So I went on this podcast yesterday and I talked to this girl, Nicole. And Nicole's like, you know, last time we talked, you had I think like 2,000 followers on Instagram and you were doing okay on TikTok, but it wasn't like amazing. And now you've blown up, what happened? And I told her the truth. I said, I just needed time to figure it out. And thank God I didn't give up. I was really considering it. I remember I was back where I'm from in New York City in Brooklyn and I would go on these long walks around the city just thinking like, what am I doing wrong? And then I had to learn that I had like the wrong setting on reusevideo.com, which syndicates my content from TikTok. I use reusevideo.com, which makes it so whenever I post a video on TikTok, it comes out everywhere else simultaneously. I had the wrong setting checked on reusevideo.com, which was suppressing views on Instagram. When my videos went from TikTok to Instagram, it was suppressing views. So then randomly by accident, isn't it so funny how like sometimes it's just an accident. If you keep going for long enough, you figure it out with an accident. And accidentally something happened, I think reusevideo.com was down. So I had to manually upload to Instagram and my video popped off and I said, huh, I wonder if like the way that I uploaded this caused this. So I tried it again and then it happened again. And I tried it again and again and my friends tried it again and again. And we were all growing so fast on Instagram and I learned what I was doing wrong, but it took me literally almost a year to figure this out. Almost a year to figure this out on Instagram. And Instagram, I talked about this before, Instagram is tremendous for getting opportunities. I have like two to five people trying to hire me every day on Instagram. I ignore everyone because I'm not trying to sell my time. I'm making products which can scale and sell. That's way, it's just way more fun for me. Lots of people like to have their main business being them selling their time. And if that's you, that's cool. I enjoy helping people and giving people advice. But for me, the most fun thing is just making products at scale and making funnels for those products. That's what's most fun for me. And now I get two to five people trying to hire me on Instagram every day just through DMs. And I don't respond to anyone anymore because it's not what I'm trying to do, but it is a very lucrative channel. It is a, Instagram is a great channel, but it took me time to figure that out. I think the business audience on Instagram is more likely to have money than the business audience on TikTok. Both audiences are great. From my personal experience and the experience of my friends, Instagram is the best audience, but it took me time to figure out the exact way to post on Instagram. By the way, I share that on one of my articles. If you go to edwardsterm.com/articles, it's just my exact social media posting strategy. I share exactly what I learned. There's no like, you don't have to give your email to read it. It's a step-by-step of how I post. But it took me time to learn this stuff because I just had to stick with it. It always takes longer than you think, but it does happen. Slow with smooth, smooth is fast. Everyone's looking for the shortcut, but the quickest way to your goals is the long cut. And so I wanna start the long cut movement. It's something that I'm really passionate about. It's what I wanted to talk about on today's show. I talk about growth hacks all the time, but I just wanted to talk about the long cut. I was thinking about my friend who sold his company for tens of millions of dollars and how it wasn't immediate for him and how it's not immediate for so many others, but it does happen 'cause no one is so dumb that they won't figure it out over time if they just do it every day. So that's the subject of this episode. I hope this was useful for some people. If you're doing something and you're thinking about giving up, don't give up. The one exception, and I've said this before, but one exception is if you have to count on co-founders who are not doing their job, if you have business partners who are not doing their job or putting in the necessary work, start your own thing and then stick with that for years. Expect that it's gonna take longer than you think and stick with it for years because having co-founders who aren't delivering, I've been there. I think lots of people have been there. It's one of the worst things ever. The thing about doing anything is you can count on yourself to get stuff done, but it's risky meeting others to do stuff. It's risky depending on other people. I hate depending on other people. I like to depend on myself because I know lots of people who say that they're gonna put in the work and then they don't put in the work, but if I say I'm gonna put in the work, I put in the work. You can depend on yourself. You can't depend on other people. I don't even, I don't care if they're your friends. That actually makes it more dangerous. Working with your friends is really dangerous, bad idea. Everyone says it's a bad idea. You don't actually learn that it's a bad idea until you do it yourselves. Usually a bad idea. Sometimes it works out. It's usually a bad idea. The thing is when it works out, you hear the stories and their praise repeatedly ad nauseam so you think it's a good idea, but actually you don't hear about them many times where like it doesn't work and it's a bad idea. I'll tell you this, the people who pick things and stick with them for like 10 years and do it every day, the odds of that working out are pretty high. Whereas the odds of people starting businesses with their best friends, the odds of that working out pretty low. Like if there was a magic formula, it would be pick something, do it by yourself and commit to it for literally years and years and years. That would be the magic formula. And in five years, you'll be way better off than if you spent those five years looking for get rich quick schemes and shortcuts. So that's what I wanted to share in this episode. It's something that I'm super passionate about. Take the long cut and this is episode 372 of my daily digital marketing podcast. This one wasn't so much about digital marketing. It was something that was on my mind, something that I wanted to share. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you so much for listening. Really, I hope this was useful for a few people. I will talk to you again tomorrow.
