He was describing the mindset of the opposing parties in the revolutionary war. War seems ever present in our world, whether you look at nations, or, as Steven Pressfield puts it in the War of Art. Whether in your mind or on the ground there are two beliefs that prevent us from establishing realistic expectations.

First, he points out, is the belief that the conflict will be short. Second is the belief that the moral superiority of ones position will bring success. As it turns out, they’re both lies, and they may even keep you from achieving your highest priority goals. Let’s have a closer look.

The conflict would be short

I’ll relate this first point to marketing your products on the internet. Many entrepreneurs (myself included) harbor the belief that some innovation, tactic, campaign or other mechanism will bring them fast and effective results. The only problem is that they just haven’t found it yet.

These people understand that you can’t plant a seed one evening and expect to wake up the next day to a blossoming fruitful tree. They know that you have to water it and wait. Even after it starts to grow you have to nurse it and harden it until it has strong roots. So why do they think that somehow their business will blossom overnight?

It is simply not realistic to expect that any one tactic, product or offer will shorten the road to a thriving, successful business. Just like a seed, it requires the investment of time and effort. And even then, sometimes it just doesn’t work out and you have to plant another seed or even change the ground where you’re planting it.

Did you know that to plant an orchard takes years? Literally. After you finally get trees growing, you have to pluck all the fruit off of them for the first three years, while you continue weeding, fertilizing and pruning. That doesn’t include the years before that bringing the tree from a seed, to sapling and on to the point where you could plant it in the orchard.

From a seed, you might be five or six years out before you get a piece of fruit that you can actually eat. Sure you can shortcut that and let the fruit grow sooner, but you actually decrease the lifetime output and effectiveness of the tree. By taking too soon, you limit your overall returns.

The conflict will not be short.

Raw Undisciplined Recruits vs. Veteran British Soldiers

The next mental plague that threatened the continental army from the outset was the belief that untrained, undisciplined militia could triumph over well trained, well equipped British regulars, simply because the virtue of the cause that inspired them was morally superior.

However appealing this argument may have sounded, the fact of the matter is that discipline, training, equipment and compensation play an enormous role in the potency of an attack (or even a defense).

If you’ve convinced yourself that your better idea or refined tactic will give you the upper hand against someone who’s willing to slog through three hours of content, create 50 backlinks and make 10 JV calls per day, then you’re fooling yourself. Victory favors the person that puts in the hours and is well trained.

Weekend Warrior’s Fail

Are you a weekend militia man in your business or are you a well trained, highly disciplined British regular. If you think that success will come because you deserve it, or because your idea is better or any way other than discipline and follow through, then you should think again.

The quality of your ideas, your ability to write or even the contacts you have aren’t often the most significant factors in who wins the race. The difference between you and the guy that makes it work often comes down to discipline and work.

Ditch the Two Seductive Illusions

If you really want to win this game, then learn from history and don’t give into these two seductive illusions. The conflict will not be short and you must approach your craft with discipline and training.

P.S.
If you’re looking for a roadmap of exactly what to do, then you should really consider following along with this years Challenge (Ed Dale and his gang). You can find it here: http://www.challenge.co/

Since you are so into the good old USA, I wanted to sing you the National Anthem. I really hope you like it. I’m looking forward to talking with you on the phone soon.

Daniel

That got me to thinking about what I see as the biggest obstacle to completing either the thirty day challenge, or the challenge of getting any idea off the ground.

I once heard that “The simplest solution is usually the best”.  That was in reference to Occam’s razor, a principle that dates back to the 14th century.  When it comes to achieving any vision of your’s and you have identified parts of that vision that you don’t know how to do, the simplest solution is to ask for help.  Unfortunately there are a few cultural oddities in our present day that prevent people from asking for the help they need.  In other words, we tend to complicate the otherwise simple solution of asking our acquaintances for help.

Do you speak English (or asking the right question)?

First off, last night while I was helping my friend get over one of her major stumbling blocks I couldn’t help but remember this video that I saw on YouTube a couple of years ago.  It’s hilarious, and there’s a lesson behind it (at least I want there to be one so I can post it here).

I’m going to try to s t r e t c h a lesson out of that video and say that the lady asked the wrong question.  Rather than just asking for directions to the garage, she asked if he spoke English.  That gave him a chance to make a good game of her.  Besides, it wasn’t what she really needed anyway.

The “major stumbling block” that I was helping my friend with last night had to do with WordPress (which I love and use, by the way).  She had successfully installed a wordpress blog on her site and begun to look into themes (way to go!).  Among other things she wanted to know:

• how to update/modify her WordPress theme (such things as images and fonts)
• how to create new pages, categories, posts, etc.
• how to decide whether to create pages or posts for different types of content

Here’s the problem: before she called me I think she already decided that the technology was too difficult to figure out or that she wouldn’t be able to do it.  She did absolutely the right thing in calling me, as I’ll try to show below.

Assume that you can do it with the right help

The first little lesson to take away from this is to assume that you can do it and that you have the capacity to understand it.  This might sound stupid simple, but to show you that it is a stumbling block, I’ll tell you another story.

I have another friend that I’ve been helping do web site stuff for years.  He has actually had websites and uploaded images and other things to them.  A few weeks ago he sent me an e-mail asking how to get an e-book up to his site.  I told him how to do it in a reply.  He sent back asking me again how to do that.  I then sent him a click-by-click list of instructions to do it.  When I saw him a couple weeks later he still hadn’t uploaded his files.  He “assumed” that it was more complicated that what I had told him to do in my e-mail and so he never even tried it.  Read that again.  He never even tried to upload the files because he had already decided that there was more to it than the list of instructions I gave him.

How many items do you have on your to do list right now that you have already decided are beyond your capacity or understanding and so you haven’t even started them?  Whatever they are, go and highlight them right now and in just a minute I’ll tell you how to get them done and check them off.

American Pride (or how Walmart and credit cards stole my education)

Go back 200 years and America looked a lot different than it does today.  As with many things, there’s good and bad that comes with change.  Back when agriculture was the primary means of making a living (or should I say, staying alive), folks didn’t have a luxury of spending years in college, falling back on unemployment or just going to the store and picking up some food on their credit card before they got their next check.

Instead they relied on each other.  They imposed on each other.  When someone moved to a new area he instinctively went to those who had already farmed there and asked what worked and what didn’t.  Sometimes an experienced farmer could make something new work, but that experience comes after years of making the basics work.

Back then an education meant imposing on people and having an end in mind (like growing crops to stay alive).  It also meant that within a community there was a necessary diversity of skills and abilities.  After all, how could they barter to get a range of goods if they all did the same thing or grew the same crop.  An education back then meant acquiring practical skills through your association with others and your own testing.

Today I think there is a real tendency to assume that modern Universities in all their pomp and prestige contain a solution to every problem.  While it is flabbergasting (yes, that’s the word of the day) to imagine the amount of information and knowledge they contain, real life skills and education are as much your responsibility today as they were 200 years ago.

Don’t let your pride rob you of opportunities to learn.  Expect to try and fail.  Plan to impose on others that already have a practical skill that you need.  Don’t let yourself fall back on the dole of unemployment, or worse, a lifetime 9 to 5 job.  I think you’ll be surprised that most people feel like they get the better end of the deal when asked to do a favor.  Try it.  Ask someone to teach you something they know really well and see how appreciative they are to you after teaching it to you.  Or you could just think about the last time you taught someone something that you were good at.  How did it make you feel to see him get it?

Stop pretending to be Wonder Woman

So at the beginning of this post I asked “how do you know when to ask questions, mastermind, outsource, quit, change direction, etc.?”  I think that’s simple to answer.  The “WHEN” is always.  In our society and communities we’re surrounded by people that have real needs.  We have real needs, but we’ve conditioned ourselves to think that we should “do it alone” or that asking for help automatically equates to unecissarily imposing on others.

That’s a load of crap!

Yes, there are ways to go to far.  If I give you a list of steps to do something that you asked about and then you ask me to actually do it for you while you eat a donut and watch Oprah then I might feel put out.  But if you have your mouse in hand and a vision of where you want to end up and you think that I have some specialized knowledge that will get you there, then stop trying to be a super hero and just ask me.  As I help you I get better at:

• helping
• doing
• participating

That last one is really important and I hope it has come through in the theme of this post.  We are much more likely to succeed in collaboration than in isolation.  So the next time you find yourself depressed or frustrated, staring at your computer screen at 1:30 am wondering how in the world you’ll ever learn everything you need to be a super internet marketer, just STOP.  Back up far enough that you see the vision of where you want to be.  Write down on your to do list the things that you think you already know how to do and the things you don’t know how to do (or pull out the list that you highlighted at the beginning of this post).  Then…

Do the unthinkable (aka, the simplest solution)!

For each task that you don’t know how to do, write the name of someone you know that is most likely to know how to do it right next to the item on your list.  Then send out e-mails briefly explaining your vision and the thing you can’t figure out.  ASK your friend, co-worker, client, vendor or whoever else it turns out to be, to help you do it.  Don’t be too surprised when you get the help you need and find your vision taking shape.

When you’ve done this a few times, come back here and post your experience as a comment on this post.  I can’t wait to hear about it.

One day he came to me and asked if I would be doing the Thirty Day Challenge with a couple of guys from Australia.  I did a quick search on Google and read through their homepage.  My first thought was “NO”.  I figured I was paying my good money for the good instruction with some of these other “gurus” and must have access to better, more advanced information that these guys would be putting out.  So I let it slide.

That is, until my friend started telling me about some of the stuff that they were working on and how they ran the challenge.  I decided to subscribe just to see how it would go.  Well I ended up staying on board with the challenge through the entire season, and I’m sure glad I did.  For anyone considering joining the challenge, here is what I thought of it.

The challenge is broken up into the pre-season and the actual challenge time-frame.  The challenge itself lasts 30 days (imagine that).  While the pre-season and challenge cover a relatively short period of time, my observation has been that there’s a lot of activity around it all year long.  The previous year’s challenge is left online and anyone can do it on auto pilot.  There are also great resources, like tools, forums and blog posts that continue to be relevant and active beyond the end of the challenge.  Another thing that some newbie marketers may like is that Ed Dale keeps the specific period of the challenge “pitch free”.  That can be a big deal when you think about how much some of these other gurus pound you with endless launches and pitches.

Pre-season

This period covers some of the foundational elements of out to operate online.  Things such as how to setup a Google account and why it is important to have one.  Twitter, facebook, ustream, how to setup Firefox and a number of other tools are covered.  This training doesn’t really apply to Internet marketing per se, but it’s all required to do Internet marketing.  A lot of this training was boring to me, but I’ve been an active web developer for almost a decade.  For others that are just getting started this training could be a god send.

The challenge

This is the meat and potatoes of the whole deal.  I remember thinking that this content was absolutely fantastic.  In fact, compared to some of the products that I had purchased, this was better organized, more broad, and hence more useful in tying related pieces together, and in some ways more accessible.  In the case of last year, all the training was available in various video formats, as MP3 and transcripts were also made.  I archived all of it since it was extremely valuable for me.

Another great aspect of the challenge is that Ed first teaches the approach for getting traffic that will let you do everything for free, but he also discusses the paid options, like AdWords.  This is great for the folks that have a little capitol that they don’t mind investing to speed up the process.  He also does a good job explaining when to call it quits and how to make the most of the work you’ve done in the case of a failure.  For example, if you manage to get some free traffic coming to your site, but it doesn’t convert, put ads on there and make the most of the traffic.  It might not be a windfall, but it does recoup some of your invested time.

Conclusion

The Thirty Day Challenge was a great learning experience for me, and one that helped me make sense of the paid products that I’d purchased up to that point.  As I’m getting ready today to do the challenge again, I’ve realized it’s also a good annual reminder to try something new.  It can be hard to think about starting a new project, but it really helps to go through the process with a bunch of people.  If you have any inkling to get involved with internet marketing but have wondered where to start, or you’re getting tired of paying for sub-standard training, I recommend you sign up for the challenge.  If you don’t get to all the pre-season stuff, don’t sweat it, but make sure you pay attention to the meaty content they provide during the challenge.

Post your comments below and tell me what you think about the challenge and share your successes.