Like This Post If You Want To Throw Your Laptop Lifestyle Out The Window!
As I write this, I’m sitting at my kitchen table gulping down the last swig of some freshly juiced oranges from the farmer’s market. And, in a single moment of regret, I realize my error: I should have walked across the street to take a selfie on the beach against the golden rays of the setting sun, orange juice in hand.
What was I thinking? What kind of entrepreneur lives across the street from the beach and doesn’t post selfies of sand, sunsets, legs, and laptops?
Well, this entrepreneur right here. Me.
I mean, don’t get me wrong, my legs are a little bit hairy but I just don’t have time to post selfies in the sand. I’m too busy deconstructing the lie of ultimate freedom called “Entrepreneurship.”
Clever marketers are selling the dream of entrepreneurship
We’ve all seen the ads on Facebook:
How I Made $500,000 My First Week In Business
Make 6 Figures Working 5 Hours Per Year
Start Raking In $10,000/Minute With This Simple Trick
How To Live The Laptop Lifestyle
And on, and on…
I’m going to share a secret with you that isn’t so much a secret. Titles like these are clickbait. They’re created by clever copywriters to get your attention and make you click. I would know, I’ve been writing them for years.
The truth is, nobody really makes $500,000 their first week in business, or rakes in $10,000/minute with a simple trick. And it doesn’t take long to discover there is no trick on the other side of that link. The only trick is that you’ve been duped into clicking on it. Nothing new here, Henry.
Marketers know what you want, and use that to get you to click on their ad so you’ll give them your email address in exchange for downloading their free e-book that took them an hour to create – an e-book that doesn’t tell you anything truly useful. It’s usually just a compilation of general information.
For the consumer, these e-books are given fancy titles like, “The Ultimate Guide to Getting Everything You Want in Life.” And to the marketer, these e-books are simply called “lead magnets.” And that’s really all they are – magnets to suck you into giving away your email address so someone can sell you a bunch of shit.
Marketers are giving you these free e-books just to get your email address so they can drop you into a drip-fed email marketing campaign in an attempt to create rapport with you, hoping you’ll eventually buy their high-ticket items.
And if you’re an entrepreneur, specifically an internet marketer, you’re the perfect customer (or sucker). The biggest section of the internet marketing industry markets to other marketers. But the irony is that most people who consider themselves internet markets are really just consumers caught up in a fabricated world they’ve been unknowingly sucked into.
As an internet marketer, how many systems, tools, and techniques do you need to buy before you realize you’ve been sold?
Internet Marketing is a Pyramid Scheme
Internet marketing is a self-referencing, self-sustaining pyramid scheme in the shape of a circle. I say it’s a pyramid scheme because the money never leaves the industry, it’s just shuffled around between marketers.
One guy at the top creates The Ultimate Marketing Guide For Entrepreneurs and sells it to anyone who will pay $97. All the people who buy it begin using the strategies outlined inside, until they reach Tip #8 which explains that the real money comes from selling downloadable guides and digital content. So, they make their own guides and digital content and sell it to anyone who will pay $97. And the cycle continues.
The entire internet marketing industry exists to sell tools to internet marketers so they can get better at selling tools to people who want to market their products on the internet. The big money in internet marketing isn’t found by selling marketing strategies directly to business owners (the people who really need help). That’s because you can’t mass-produce marketing strategies that actually work for every business in every industry.
For example, the only way to make massive money selling internet marketing techniques is to mass produce it as digital content and then sell downloads on a continual basis. If you want to help individual businesses with marketing you not only need to know the industry really well, but you also need to be an expert in marketing. And if you’re an expert in marketing you know you can’t mass produce systems that will work for any business.
By default, the only thing internet marketers are successful at is selling to other internet marketers who want to sell to other internet marketers.
At the top of the pyramid you have the heavy hitters who make their money selling tools to small fish. But they didn’t achieve their success by using the tools they’re selling—they achieved their success by selling the tools.
It’s like the stock market. The internet marketers at the top are telling everyone what works and what doesn’t. They’re dictating to us what’s effective, and what’s not. And we’re buying it. So we go with it.
They literally set up the market just so they can keep selling us products. Meanwhile, the techniques they’re selling us for $97 aren’t the techniques they’re actually using. They’re not even using the techniques they’re selling to us. There’s only one technique they’re using and that’s basic psychology.
“I had a client who sold his kidney to pay for my services,” a marketer once told me.
“Freedom is priceless,” said another.
They’ll say anything to make you believe that your investment today is going to somehow create your ultimate future. And it won’t. Because it’s all bullshit.
If the value of stocks is determined by the actions of the traders (and it is), then just like the stock market, the value of internet marketing information is determined by the people who buy it. As long as we keep buying these strategies, they stay in power and at the top.
When you become an internet marketer, you may as well just put everyone’s name in a hat and draw names to find out who gets your money this month. You’re all just trading it back and forth with each other. Now that would give you a legitimate 4-minute workweek.
And who can argue with courses claiming to give you more freedom? Freedom isn’t even measurable because it’s so abstract. What does that even mean?
And we’re all mesmerized by the idea that entrepreneurship takes endless hard work and time, that even when we don’t get the results we hoped for, we chalk it up to the process. Nothing happens instantly, you know. Keep pushing. Keep swimming in the minutia of statistics, reports, measurements, CTR, conversion rates, and don’t stop.
If you keep pushing, you’ll get there. Where? Who knows, just keep going.
We don’t think for a moment that the entire world of internet marketing is a giant rouse.
Entrepreneurship (n): Glorified Self-Employment. Also Known As A 24/7 J-O-B
I began freelancing long before the term “Laptop Lifestyle” was a Facebook ad cliché. In fact, I started freelancing before Facebook even existed. I lived the ‘Laptop Lifestyle’ with a Compaq Presario that could barely connect to the Internet with my 14.4 dialup modem through AOL. Ahh, that was the life.
As an entrepreneur, I was free to do whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted. Or so I thought. At the time, I had no idea I wasn’t really doing what I wanted to do, and I wasn’t really free. I was a slave to my laptop instead of a cubicle, a desk and a boss.
How did I convince myself I loved what I did, when I really hated every moment of it?
I saw the potential for big money. Really, that’s all it was. I knew my skills were “worth a lot of money” and I was willing to use those skills to create a business and generate clients.
You may be thinking, ‘what’s wrong with a 24/7 J-O-B if you love what you do? If you love it, then it’s not work!’
Let’s be real… you don’t really love what you do for a living… and if you won the lottery tomorrow you’d drop it like it’s hot. You love it because it brings you money.
You Don’t Want The Laptop Lifestyle – You Want To Go Play At The Beach
Let’s be completely honest here. Nobody really wants to live the ‘laptop lifestyle.’ They only say they want to because they believe they have to work, so if they’re going to have to work they may as well work on the beach.
But who wants to work? Nobody. And on the beach? Laptops and sand don’t mix very well. And I don’t know about you, but no matter how deeply I buried my power cord in the sand, it didn’t power up my MacBook Pro when the battery died.
Why do you want to live the laptop lifestyle promoted in ads? If you look hard enough, you’ll see that it’s a trap. Not because it’s impossible, but because you’ve been sold a dream that nobody really lives. Sure, they live it on Facebook—but that’s not real life. Not even close.
The “laptop lifestyle” is a very limiting lifestyle when what you really want is not to have to work at all. I mean, really, let’s be honest here. Who in their right mind wants to work? Nobody. And there’s nothing wrong with admitting that. It’s actually quite natural.
We are not here to work in the manner we’ve established through society’s institutions. Of course we don’t want to do something that sucks our soul day after day and barely allows us time to ourselves. But you’d have to be cray-cray to actually want to work.
We’re spending our lives, every day, every hour calculating ways to make more money, maximize our profits, increase numbers, force that graph line to go up… what the fuck for? Who the fuck cares?
I’m going to tell you a very short story that will blow your mind.
Once upon a time, I built a website with invalid, broken code, high-contrast white text on a black background with Comic Sans copy, layered iframes on every page, heavy JavaScript, heavy Flash animation, poorly made images instead of text, and I had exactly two backlinks to Geocities websites. I couldn’t make up my mind, so I changed the layout weekly, including constantly rearranging the navigation menu. You may remember this website as DylanKlebold.com. (Yeah… sorry about that).
Still, this website dominated the search engines for over ten years for every term in my niche. I had over a million hits per month with 3,000 active posters on my discussion forum. I deleted the website for 2 years and when I put it back up it regained an instant 300,000 unique monthly visitors. I could not kill this website no matter how hard I tried. It was like a zombie that just wouldn’t die.
I didn’t have an email list. I never replied to emails half the time. And everyone was constantly asking to buy things from me and I just didn’t want to bother. The more people bugged me, the more annoyed I got. So, I finally gave in and started selling stuff at cost just to keep people happy. I didn’t want a business—I wanted to share information.
I had effortless success with this hard-to-navigate, eyesore of a website and yet, so many people run around looking for magic courses to teach them how to build a website and get traffic.
Here’s the truth: your site doesn’t need to be pretty, and if you’re struggling to find ways to get traffic, or if you keep buying courses, attending webinars, etc. you’re in the wrong business.
If you’re struggling like this, you are a consumer, but you think you’re an entrepreneur. The real entrepreneurs have made a business out of selling things to wanna-be entrepreneurs who get just enough success to think they’re onto something. But they’re just reselling the same thing everyone else is selling and the person who can package it (market it) the best, wins.
That’s all it is. That’s the entire game in a nutshell.
Real entrepreneurs have something unique, different, and innovative to offer the world. They are not consultants or coaches and whatever other nebulous titles people use these days. If you’re selling advice, tips, and strategies to people to help them build their business, you’re not really selling anything unique. Even if your clients achieve mega success, you’re still boring.
Your product probably sucks, or you really don’t care about it. You’re not doing what you’re passionate about. You’re doing what you think you’re passionate about because you think that being passionate about it will bring you money. It doesn’t work that way. Only your contribution matters.
And why bother selling tools to people to increase their sales when they’re selling more nonsense that people don’t need? More minutia for the world to get lost in? That’s not a contribution. But hey, you slayed your bounce rate, you increased your conversion rate, and your PPC ad conversions are off the charts! Go you.
I was in my early 20’s when I noticed something was terribly wrong with what we call “having a job and going to work.”
I started working at the age of fifteen, and had a natural repulsion to getting up early, dressing up in an uncomfortable uniform, giving up my day to let someone boss me around in exchange for not enough money to survive, and then going home exhausted. I was told that’s how the world works, and if I didn’t participate I’d end up homeless and starving on the streets. That made me angry, and I knew it wasn’t true, but I didn’t know there were other options so I played along.
Like everyone else I knew, I had been conditioned to believe my natural repulsion to having a job was really just laziness. Everyone else got up to go to work in the morning. What made me so special that I thought I could avoid it?
I always found it odd that that people in history didn’t have jobs like we do today. Nobody in my history books ever left their house to travel an hour to a far away place where they labored all day and night in a stuffy cubicle just to bring home a weekly paycheck that barely paid for food. It just wasn’t part of their day. When people had a job, it was on their own farm, or they ran a local business in town.
At the time, I had yet to learn that jobs were just a synthetic construction of life on Earth that had been created as an extension of the school system designed to produce obedient factory workers to dumb down the world. But, that’s another story—one better told by John Taylor Gatto.
Not wanting to be seen as lazy, I kept pushing forward. For over a decade I got up between 3 and 4am, went to work, came home exhausted, fell asleep watching television, and got up the next day to do it all over again. I lived for my days off, which were unpredictably inconsistent. I had all kinds of plans for what I would do on my days off—except I was always too tired to do anything. So I did nothing.
I repeated this cycle until I was 29 years old when I decided to be my own boss.
After I got tired of dealing with clients, I didn’t know what to do, so I went back to working for a big corporation in exchange for a regular paycheck. It was a more comfortable false sense of security.
Entrepreneurship is still bondage in the system
I came to recognize the same pattern of bondage in the world of entrepreneurship—something that was supposed to generate freedom. Of course, I wondered if maybe I just wasn’t doing that whole “success” thing correctly. However, when I explored what it would be like to achieve Richard Branson’s level of success, I still came up empty handed.
Who the fuck cares?
When I set my income goal at $2,000/month, I thought I was going to feel great.
When I achieved that goal, I was still struggling.
When I set my income goal at $3,000/month, I thought I was finally going to feel satisfaction.
When I achieved that goal, I was still struggling.
When I set my income goal for $6,500/month, I thought, aha! I just never set my goal high enough!
… when I achieved that goal, I was no longer struggling, but I didn’t care.
Society says I should set another goal, perhaps $10,000/month.
Why bother?
Who the fuck cares?
The entire system is fucked.
I’m happier tending to my garden than being forced to make money to participate in a warped society focused on consumerism, materialism, and other nonsense. It’s a joke. And the joke’s on us because we accept it as normal from cradle to grave. Oh, but we try to incorporate nature into our materialistic lives. Every once in a while, we go on a hike out on a trail or go boating. You know, to maintain balance in our lives.
When the awakening process began to take over what I thought was “my” life, I didn’t care if I had a hundred trillion billion dollars and everyone fell at my feet when I walked out my front door. I didn’t care if I had my dream car, my dream house, or all the latest technological gadgets to play with. Furthermore, I didn’t even care if I was genius enough to cure every cancer in the world, end world hunger, stop every war, and save the planet from pollution.
Nothing, and I mean nothing mattered if I didn’t know first hand who I really am—beyond the programmed personality. Beyond the system of distraction called money, school, work, job, entrepreneurship, bullshit, rinse, repeat.
So, I did what any sane entrepreneur would do—I threw my laptop lifestyle out the window.
Bye, Felicia.
