A few days ago, I received an email with the subject, “How I Make $5,000 a week, working only 5 hours” I read this kind of message once in a while to decipher the psychological game being played. This person was all about showing proof that he actually makes this amount of money with little effort. Was he telling a lie? May be; maybe not. Is his claim possible? I know well enough that people make a lot more than that. So there is nothing surprising about it. The only problem is that people that make such claims, while their claim may be genuine, only tell the half-truth. And half-truth can be as destructive as a full-blown lie.
Let me explain how this works in many cases. Let’s take an ideal figure as an example; Kola. Kola started his online review platform 4 years ago to review the newest tech gadgets. Throughout this period he devoted his entire life to creating content for his website. Soon his website grows to receive 30,000 page views per day. He makes money through affiliate marketing and advertising. Now Kola is making $5,000 per week, which is very practical. He can afford to hire other writers to create content, and a content manager to handle the writers. Now Kola has a lot of time and decides to start another business teaching people how to create a business like his. He promises his followers that, he will teach them how to makes $5,000 per week, working only 5 hours. Is Kola telling some truth? That’s arguable. But he is only telling part of the story.
Believing half-truths like this keeps a lot of people poor or at most average. They don’t get in with the mindset that this is going to take a lot of work, time, effort, and resources. They go in with the hope of making it within a few months. Unfortunately, they get disappointed and move on to the next shiny object. There are more half-truths like this that have held a lot of people poor or average. And I’m going to share 5 more of them with you in this video. Before we continue, be sure to subscribe to After School Africa for more enlightening videos like this.
1. The market is saturated
After I graduated from the university, I wanted to get into the clearing and forwarding business. So I approached a family friend and told him about my intention. His response was that the clearing and forwarding business was saturated, with a lot of competition. He successfully discouraged me from getting into the business. Well, today I know a number of people who got into the business much later and are doing well today. How many times have you dismissed an opportunity simply because there are too many people already doing it?
By this logic, people should stop going to the university to study because there is already a disproportionate number of job-seeking graduates. People should stop studying law because there are too many lawyers on the street.
It is a half-truth that most markets that have huge potential to grow wealth is saturated. The other half of the truth is that there is also high demand for the service and a lot of problems to be solved. And if you distinguish yourself well enough, and keep showing up long enough, you can carve out your own share of the market. You see, the majority of businesses are terrible with customer service. If you can get this right, you can command a sizable market share. Don’t limit yourself because of this half-truth. The blogging industry is saturated. The number of Video bloggers keeps increasing. There are many programmers already. Well, I can tell you without a doubt that there will be people who get into any of these industries today that will have success stories in a few year’s time. Yes, the market may be saturated, but there are over 7 billion people on the planet. The field is large enough.
2. You have to be an expert
Most professions have gatekeepers. And expertise is often institutionalized. In the specialized fields, there is a good reason for this. You have to go through law school to qualify as a lawyer. You have to go through medical school to practice as a medical doctor. But you don’t need a marketing certificate or any organization’s approval to become a marketer. You don’t need much to become a software developer. You don’t need an MBA to run a business.
Many people have been crippled by the notion that they need some expert approval before they can pursue their dreams. But if you look around, most of the renowned successful people we know are not institutional experts in their domain.
In the past, you had to spend several years in isolation studying a subject before you are qualified to help people and provide solutions around that field. But in today’s changing world, by the time you are done schooling, most of what you learned would be outdated. You don’t have to be a schooled expert to profit from a field. One, you can partner with someone who is more knowledgeable or skillful than you are. Two, you can serve a part of the market that can benefit from your level of skill. Three, you can profit merely from your journey to become an expert. And four, there are numerous resources online to learn what you need to know. You don’t have to be an expert to profit from a field.
3. You have to start big
Many people are discouraged from starting a business because of a lack of capital. Indeed, you need capital to start most businesses. And you need capital to grow any business. But you definitely don’t need to start big.
Think about this. How could online publishing overtake traditional publishing? How did news blogs out-perform newspapers? In the past, the game was about the big fish swallowing the small fish. But the business landscape today is about the fast fish swallowing the slow fish. Fast is better than big. You don’t need to start big, you need to move fast. In the era of fast-paced technological change, it is those who move fast to adopt new opportunities and remain consistent that wins.
Also, in the past, you had to invest a lot of money to run an ad in the newspaper, radio, or TV, without a guarantee of how the ad was going to perform. There was no chance for trial and error; you go full scale. Today, thanks to digital technology tools, you can start your marketing campaign with as little as $5, measure the result, tweak it and keep testing until you identify what works for you before investing more money. Anyone who says you have to start big is not telling you the whole truth. Most of the startups with big investments started with a lot of testing and experimenting in the background before hitting the limelight.
4. The harder you work the more money you make
Growing up in my pre-teen, there was this young man from the northern part of the country who hawks locally made sponge. He would walk all day on the streets with his signature catcall for attention, “Meow” As kids, he scared us because of his dark skin and cat sound. Just a few months ago, I was shocked to stumble on this man, now old, doing the same job, exactly the same way. No improvement. No innovation. Just the same product, and the same marketing strategy. This was a hard-working man, with little to show for his hard work.
Hard work is definitely a requirement for success in any field of endeavor. But your hard work has to be smart. Are the richest people the hardest workers you can find? Not likely. Are they the smartest? Not necessarily. In fact, you will often find the hardest workers among the poor. The genuinely rich people who earned their wealth are smart workers. The smarter you work, the higher your chance of success. Just telling people to work hard is not enough. You have to be smart with your work.
5. Rich People are Extraordinary
This half-truth is here to make you feel like you don’t have what it takes to be financially successful. It makes people – especially people in Africa – worship money and those that have it. This belief empowers the political class and the oppressors. It’s like the saying, “the greatest trick of the devil is to convince the man he doesn’t exist” So most people are already convinced that success is unattainable for them. So they settle for less.
Rich people are not extraordinary human beings. They are mostly people who make the hard decision to take one extra step one day at a time. What you often see is the result of compounded little steps over a long period of time. May be that makes them extraordinary in some sense. But the whole truth is that they are mostly not humanly superior.
There are many other half-truths I want to share. But I don’t want to make this video any longer than it already is. Understand that the market is saturated, but you can still succeed in it. You don’t have to start big. The smarter you work the more money you can make. You don’t have to be an expert to profit from any field. Rich People are not extraordinary. I hope you learned something from this. If you are yet to subscribe to this channel, now is a good time to hit the subscribe button. Until next time; YOUR SUCCESS MATTERS!
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