Do for a Year What Others Won’t

Are You Willing to Do for a Year What Others Won’t?

Early on in my journey as an online entrepreneur, I chose a motto that would resonate not only with me, but with people all over the world. It’s “Do for a Year What Others Won’t; Live, Forever the Way Others Can’t.” It was in 2008, just as I had reached six-figures a year in my online business and had begun my first mentoring program.

Elyse was my age and we’d both been students at UCLA during the late 1970s. She was married and they had a son who had just graduated from high school. Her dream was to leave the corporate world and have an online business to replace her current income of just over 100K a year. Her husband was supportive and she was ready to begin.

She started out strong and the others in my mentoring group naturally gravitated toward her. They emailed back and forth and were impressed by her energy and creativity. I guided her to write and publish a new blog post once a week, and to become an affiliate for me and others she had purchased from online. She made some easy sales and was elated at the feeling of earning income from the internet, even if the numbers were small at the beginning.

The mentoring included a private call twice a month and we would map out a success plan for Elyse to stick to that made sense to both of us. She was smart and funny and taking to the online world of marketing and content creation like it was already a natural part of who she was. Very few people are a “natural” right out of the gate, but she certainly was, in my opinion.

But she got bored and drifted away from what she was learning. All of a sudden she wanted to spend more time with her family, even though they were supportive and encouraging her to work hard to replace her income from her corporate job so she could resign and work from her home computer instead.

By the third month she had begun to miss at least two of our three times a month group calls. When I hadn’t had a private call with her for almost two months, I emailed her and asked her to choose a day and time that worked for her schedule. She chose a date almost two weeks out and told me she was busy with work and family and couldn’t squeeze me in before then. I wrote back to confirm the call, and mentioned that perhaps we could discuss a short “micro” course she could create to sell online. She answered back very quickly with “Okay, but it sounds like a lot of work.”

People tell us who they are if we choose to listen, and that comment was the beginning of the end of the online business Elyse never quite got off the ground. She left my mentoring a few months later and the only place I saw her after that was on Facebook.

Fast forward twelve years to 2020, with the pandemic in full swing and everyone feeling uncertain about their future. One night right before midnight I received an email from Elyse. The subject line was in all caps and read CAN YOU HELP ME MAKE MONEY ONLINE?

I hesitated to answer her question. Yes, of course, I could help her make money. She already knew firsthand what that felt like from her brief time in the online world years earlier. But did I want to encourage and guide her again, knowing that she might give up and disappear once again? I spent several hours thinking about what was best for both of us, as well as for the people in my current mentoring program, the Incubator Mastermind. I wrote back to Elyse and told her I’d like to schedule a call with her so we could catch up and decide what our next steps together would look like.

I’d love to say that this time everything was different, but it wasn’t. Elyse had even more reasons – excuses – for not moving forward now than she did years earlier. She had told me it wasn’t someone else’s idea for her to jump back into internet marketing, but she finally admitted that it was her son, now a financial planner working for a nationally known company who had brought it us. It was he who longed to leave his job, and she had agreed to help him get started.

She told me that the 15 to 20 hours a week I ask everyone I mentor to commit to their businesses was simply too many hours for her. When I asked her what she believed was a more reasonable number for her she said 5 to 10, except during weeks where she was busy with other things. Her family came first, she insisted, but her actions told a different story. She admitted to me that her son had complained that she hadn’t spent enough quality time with him over the years and believed working online would bring them closer together.

Having an online business means that you must be the toughest boss you’ve ever had. I reminded her of my motto to do for a year what others won’t, but she countered by telling me she didn’t need to spend a year to get to six figures or more of sustainable income from her online business. She had a better way. Yes, I’ve seen and heard this from more people than you can imagine over these past two decades. The better way never seems to come to fruition and it costs them more than they earn in the long run.

The bottom line is that you simply must step away from all but the most important activities with your family and close friends in order to get your business up and running during that all-important first year.When my family thought I would never miss another special event with them once I had resigned from teaching and given away my real estate clients, I explained to them that I needed a year to learn how to run my new online business and at least begin to replace my previous income before I could commit to every occasion and event with them.

Be honest with your family members. Tell them that Connie says you must be willing to do for a year what others won’t do, so that you can live the rest of your life the way others will never be able to do. And if you don’t, you’ll be reliving your first year over and over and over again, until you finally give up and quit.

I told Elyse she could come into my mentoring program for six months. She sent me the money right away and seemed genuinely excited to be a part of online entrepreneurship again. But less than two months in she asked if her son Jeremy could take her place. I agreed, and it turned out he was more willing to do the work and put in the hours to get his new online business up and running, or so it seemed.

The following month, he wrote to tell me he was playing the stock market and no longer had any interest in creating an online business. I wished him well, and haven’t heard from either of them since the beginning of 2021.

What’s the lesson here? There are many, but the primary one is that the overwhelming majority of people make better employees than entrepreneurs. Even if they are not happy with the circumstances and the income is limited to less than they would prefer, it’s the perceived stability of a paycheck and perhaps a health plan that keeps people working for someone else besides themself.

Maybe it was because I continued working on a part-time basis in real estate, long after I had earned my clear teaching credential that I understood the difference between being an employee of the school district and calling the shots with the real estate assignments I chose to take as an independent contractor. People I knew in both careers had no idea I had two ways to bring in money, and now I can make money without a job in a way that makes sense.

I had the best of both worlds for years at a time. When real estate was slow, I knew I always had a paycheck coming and health care covered. When we went on strike early in my teaching career, I went into the real estate office each day and worked with clients. But as I got older, I began to see things differently. I needed to feel like the work I was doing was meaningful to me and those I served, and I wanted my income potential to be unlimited. Online entrepreneurship was the gift from God I had been dreaming of all along.

How about you? Are you ready and willing to do what it takes to be successful as an online entrepreneur? Committing to this lifestyle takes courage, but once you decide to do for a year what others won’t you will then understand that you have crossed the threshold and are now on your way to a lifestyle by design.

I’m bestselling USA Today and Wall Street Journal author Connie Ragen Green, always at the ready to help others join me to do for a year what others won’t and reach the top of any mountain they have chosen to climb.