I am a relatively organized and driven person, but I do get comfortable. Comfortable is spending way to much time exploring and not enough time marketing and getting links. Comfortable is putting off my 4 hour sessions of work that I do on the weekends and settling for the couple hours a day spent on my daily to do’s.

Then something happens. What is something?

• The basket all my eggs were in gets banned by Google.
• Other Adwords advertisers advance heavily on my campaigns for days before I notice it.
• Due to a bookkeeping error, my credit card bounces at the hosting provider and Adwords at the same time.
• A Clickbank vendor gets my account put on hold because he thought it was unfair that I ranked higher for his product than he did.
• A site slowing slips to half the traffic it once had and I haven’t noticed.
• I upload the wrong file to the wrong place and kill off all of my landing pages for a day while the ad money keeps flowing in.
• I transfer a domain and forget to update the nameservers and don’t even check until sales show the issue.

Initially, I am the deer in the headlights or Chicken Little, you choose. A bunch of expletives, a few pity parties, and a couple of "Whoa is me" thrown in for good measure. And then I go back into "I’m a newbie, but I need to make $1000 in two days" mode. I grasp at anything to make the money come in a little more and I try to do everything at once.

But if I let that initial phase blow over, something my wife taught me, everything becomes more clear. Comfortable is gone and stops blinding my path. My focus goes to the issue that caused the problem and the plan that I had before the comfortable period stopped me.

The 5000 ways to make money stop chattering in the background and I go back through my notes and to do list and take out the Samurai sword. Cut and burn time. I create a new list of only those things that will move me forward now. The long term goal are still there, but short term goals help with focus. This list I order by the estimated effect on sales and the degree of difficulty.

I liken it to the two times we have had a flood. Yes, two. One in Phoenix and one here, a year after the first one. All the hoarding, all the saving for a rainy day is done. Everything goes in the trash. Well, not everything, but all those things that just sat there because there was space for them. After the initial freak out following our second flood, I was happy. Happy to get all the crap out of the basement. Now we will be renting a small dumpster every year and acting like we had a flood.

Once I am done with my list, I move. It is these times I am most efficient. Things get done at a lightning pace. By then I am happy to be panicked. I may not check my sales stats so that it can continue at least enough to blast through the old comfortable period and into a new one.

For now that works. Because those comfortable periods always seem to come back. So I am thankful for the small blessing of shit hitting the fan every once and a while.

I have been writing the posts in this blog for the me of three years ago. "I come from hard working stock." Three years ago I was just looking for a job that paid more. That’s all I wanted. I was always told to "keep a good job" but I have never held a job for more than three years.

I always thought it would be different with the next job. In fact within a month of getting a new job, I usually learned enough to give the veterans a run for their money. I was excited to try something new. I always got big raises, one year it was 50%. And with some of these jobs I made it into management. And until I was 23 or so, no matter of hard work or initiative really mattered at the jobs I worked. For some reason, up to then, only my age counted.

Sometimes it takes moving up the ladder quickly to realize that there is no pay off. A few years of this and I realized that with a degree and and job that paid more, it would have been the same but it would have taken me longer to catch on. It doesn’t matter how much you get paid if you don’t like what you are doing. And if you have a problem with authority, there is no "job" you like doing.

I could not see out of this tunnel. And when I finally started making money online, it clicked. So many things I had read and that people had told me had a new meaning. There was no tunnel. Despite my anger with my working situtation and the ideals of those who seemed to enjoy their low paying jobs, I had fallen for the trap. The tunnel had slowly constructed itself out of these working class ideals. It didn’t take much to have it evaporate, just one foot in the right direction.

I consider myself lucky because I knew it was a series of chance occurrences that woke me up. Ever since then I having been trying to put to words a way to cause that snap without all the work.

Small places have small ideas. Small jobs breed small ideas. If this is all you have to work with, you have a chore ahead of you.

If you do not shake this when you try to take off on your own, it will still be the same. Old voices will taunt you. Old friends may not recognize you with your newly found attitude. And this may cause you to go back to the tunnel.

Or you could start making money online and be so flabergasted by the amount you can make with a few hours of work that you find the real culprit. Or not.

If I gave you a job that doubled your income instantly, how long would the money blind you? How long would you be satified with what I gave you?

The same game your boss played with you is still real and alive in your head. The carrot. But you have become pretty good at playing it yourself, haven’t you?

I have gone through many layers of internet marketing from Ebay to product creation to affiliate marketing. Those tangents were just as important to the lesson I have learned. But It took a few years in for me to take the first one.

As I go back down into the depths of the internet marketing machine every once in and while, I see the same people there that were there years ago. They are thriving or else they wouldn’t still be there. But they haven’t changed much.

And where some people stop amazes me. The tunnel is strong with these people. They still have their eye on the carrot.

So take a few tangents. It really doesn’t matter which ones. Each one will show you something new. Do it to cut the string from that carrot. Do it again to make sure it is still not there. Throw yourself in a few times where you don’t belong and feel free to make mistakes until you get what I am trying to say in this post. And then do it again.

And if you still don’t get it, read Siddhartha by Herman Hesse. It’s a short book.

The truth. The carrot never really leaves. You have to fight it whenever you can.

Sometimes you have to put one foot in front of the other. That’s it. Just focus on that and things will happen. Choose only the amount of daily projects you can get done and do them every day. Ignore everything else. Don’t let the latest greatest thing distract you from what you have chosen to do.

I have been wishy washy with many things in the past, but affiliate marketing taught me something by accident right after I started making money. The first paragraph sums it up. Of course it’s not all I needed to know. I also needed to know when to step back, take a overview of the whole situation, and change my priorities.

I had built a site to market some affiliate products. When I was done with it, it was not making any money. So I moved on to another method. Up to this point, I had made less than $200 from affiliate marketing in total and less than $5000 from any type of internet business. I had jumped around from method to method. I learned a lot, but didn’t make a lot.

Well, as I was off finding another way to make some money, the site I had built starting getting traffic. I had followed everything I had learned to get traffic to the site, step by step and added my own twists. I just figured the results would be instant. When nothing happened, I just thought I had wasted more time. I was wrong.

This site went on to make me close to $20,000 over the period of 5 months. It worked. My timing was just off.

Now I am more patient. No, I lie. Now I know how to tell myself to shut up and just do it. No matter what you are learning or new way to building traffic or making sales that you are trying, you have to give your work a chance to build some steam. I have found no better metaphor.

Days and days of beating your head against the wall. Then the boiler explodes.

It is much better to understand after the first time it has happened to you. You know to have patience, because you actually experienced it paying off. You know to follow your new method with the devotion of addict, at least until you have given it a fair shot. And a fair shot is about 3 times the amount of time you believe it is. You know that "I’ll do that tomorrow" is a tiny hole that will grow in mass until it sucks every motivation out of you.

And post like this, I think, are like preaching to the choir. If you know this, you know this. If you don’t, you won’t really get the full effect until you experience it.