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Techgirl has a good post about confidence in her blog, The Optimised Life. She talks about a time when she was a girl and she was nervous about talking with others. Her mother gave her some great advice and told her not to think about herself, but to think about who she was talking to.

I’m always interested in new paradigms that help me better my life. It’s amazing to me how much power thought has.

After all, the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful is often found only in their thoughts, not in their environments.

I read a lot. Lately, I’ve been reading Sex, Money, KISS by Gene Simmons and The Adweek Copywriting Handbook by Joe Sugarman. I came across another paradigm shift that really impressed me in these two books.

You might be wondering what the rock and roll star, Gene Simmons, and the legendary direct response ad writer, Joseph Sugarman, have to do with each other. Let me explain.

I don’t know Gene Simmons personally, but from what I read about him in his book, he’s not some Keith Richards, self-destructive rock and roll wastrell. He’s quite the opposite.

Simmons is obsessed with making money. He’s an entrepreneur’s entrepreneur.

He’s not only very successfully marketed the band KISS, but he’s a promoter, a movie producer, and the owner of a publishing business.

What Simmons says about money and business is very much worth paying attention to.

One comment that really struck home with me was this. Most of Simmons’ business attempts have been failures. He lists the bands he’s tried to promote, but that never actually got off the ground. He’s a very prolific entrepreneur, yet quite a lot of his businesses never succeded. Yet Gene Simmons is worth mega-millions. Why?

He made a lot of money from the business ventures that did work.

In his book about writing direct sales copy, Joseph Sugarman says essentially the same thing.

Sugarman is the guy who first sold electronic calculators via the mail.

You might remember “BluBlockers,” sunglasses that Sugarman’s company sold through infomercials on TV. He sold over $30,000,000 of these things! In other words, like Simmons, Sugarman knows how to make money.

Yet he says that by far most of his business ideas were flops. Again, he made so much money on the few successes that the flops didn’t matter.

This paradigm of trying lots of stuff, having most of it fail, yet reaping big rewards from the few things that do work out, is very realistic. I believe that it might have been in one of Dan Kennedy’s books where he said one of the keys to success is to try more things faster!

What would that mean to an internet marketer? Well, try more website ideas, and try them faster.

The great thing about selling stuff on the Internet is that the start up costs are so minimal. For a website like a blog that you want to eventually monetize (as I do this one), once you pay for hosting (roughly $7.00 a month), the rest is just your time. If you’re actually selling a product, then you have more of an investment, but still not nearly as much as a traditional business.

The Internet allows you to try a lot more things much faster.

This is why the Internet is revolutionizing entrepreneurship. It’s becoming the people’s entrepreneurship platform, par excellence!

Once I internalized this idea of trying more faster, I immediately came up with three new ideas for websites. As I get them published, I’m sure I’ll be blogging about my successes and failures.

Knowing that most of what you try is not going to work out frees you from having to make bogus projections about what your business is going to be doing six months from now, next year, five years from now.

This is true seat-of-the-pants entrepreneurship!

Ciao!

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This entry was posted on Thursday, April 19th, 2007 at 9:46 am and is filed under Blogging, Self-help, Business. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.