Why I Have Been A Failure At Making Money

Note: I am not saying that I AM a failure.

Throughout all my life, until today, I have been a failure at making money. I have never really managed to make enough money to sustain a decent lifestyle.

And during those few short periods during which I did make enough money for me to lead a ‘decent’ lifestyle, I hated the work that I was doing.

WHY?

Why have I sucked at it so badly?

Well, I’ve discovered blogging quite early in my life. I fell in love with it when I was about 21 years old. Ever since then, I couldn’t really enjoy anything else besides writing (at least not on the long-term).

I love the process of content creation.

I love sharing my thoughts with the world.

I suppose you can say that I am a typical craftsman. I love what I am doing every single day. If I could, then I would be doing nothing else. If I could, then I would ignore everything else and only focus on my writing alone.

The problem is: writing in itself doesn’t make any money. And that’s not because of the stereotype that writers are poor. It’s because writing in itself isn’t a business.

If I want to make money, then I need to forget about my craft for a little while and focus on the business side of things.

Obviously, there is a simple problem here:

I don’t want to.

I don’t enjoy that kind of stuff very much. Or at least, that’s what I am telling myself.

In reality, it’s probably more fear. The fear of doing stuff that I suck at. The fear of getting out of my comfort zone. The fear of acknowledging to myself that I have no idea what the hell I am doing.

I am just ‘maintaining’ what I already have

As my ‘business’ is going right now, I am just maintaining what I already have. I just keep posting daily on my blog without any specific purpose. I just keep doing the thing I enjoy — writing — without any specific plan on how this is going to get money into my pockets.

Every day I get more followers.

Every day I get more views.

Every day I get more engagement on my blog.

But is that really worth anything? Is that really going to push my business forward? Is that really going to help me to make money one day?

Well… yes and no.

At least by itself, it doesn’t mean anything.

If I don’t have a proper business model sitting on top of that and a clear plan on how I am going to monetize this traffic, then I can have as many readers as I want, it won’t help me at all.

So, I need a shift in my mindset.

I need to acknowledge that without turning my ‘blog’ into a ‘business’, I am going to remain poor forever.

I don’t even know…

After 4 1/2 years of blogging, I don’t even know who my target customers are. I don’t even know what problems I am solving. I don’t even know what messages I am trying to spread. I don’t even know what products I want to sell.

All this time, all I had was a vague goal:

I wanted to make money producing my OWN stuff (as opposed to working as a hired gun i.e. as a freelancer writer).

You see, here is part of the problem:

I started out blogging when I was 21 years old. Back then, I obviously wasn’t in business. I just wanted to become good at something (get a marketable skill) and happened to fall in love with blogging.

I didn’t come from a business background.

I didn’t come from any particular industry.

All I had was a vague sense that I needed a niche. And because I was continuously living abroad and had a lot of contact with foreign cultures, I chose ‘intercultural communication’ as my niche.

I experienced, researched and wrote about this topic every single day for almost 4 years.

Well, that was good thinking.

The topic will probably accompany me for the rest of my life and I am sure that one day I will make money from it. But recently I was forced to put it away for a while, because my father passed away and I am moving back to my home country (Germany).

I am refusing to write about a topic that I am not personally experiencing first-hand right now.

So there I was:

A blogger with no business, no income and no topic to write about.

I had just recently made the shift away from my own personal blog towards Medium because it was simply easier to write here and because it was easier to attract readers.

I just started writing about whatever came to my mind.

And I quickly realized that there was one thing, which I experienced first hand every single day besides communication with people from different cultures — the experience of going through the struggle of trying to make a living as a creative.

So that became my topic.

But who were the people who were supposed to read my content? What messages would I share with them? How would I be able to solve their problems? How would I be able to turn this into a product?

I had no idea about any of these things.

And I still don’t.

I am reading extensively in fields like marketing/small business/entrepreneurship every single day in order to get ideas and my thinking keeps improving a little bit every single day.

Will I manage to make enough money before I end up as a homeless man on the street?

I don’t know.

A privileged position.

I suppose a part of the problem was that I used to be in a privileged position. For years, I wasn’t forced to make a living fully by myself. My life had always been partially funded by my parents.

Obviously, it’s ‘normal’ nowadays that parents support their children who are still going to university.

But I guess, that’s a whole part of the problem.

Young adults who don’t ‘need’ to make a living completely out of their own effort, don’t really feel enough pressure to do so. They are quite okay living off the little money that they have and ‘explore’ stuff they enjoy.

There is just one big problem with it:

What if that support system suddenly breaks away? What if, from one day to another, it’s suddenly not possible to tap into this support system anymore?

That’s exactly what happened to me.

Unfortunately, my father unexpectedly passed away from one moment to another 7 months ago.

We had always thought that he was completely healthy, but then BOOM, from one day to another, he was gone.

Not only did this put me into a state of immense shock, grief and sadness (I had been living abroad this whole time thinking that I’d still have plenty of time to spend with him as I got older and settled down), but it also meant that I’d have to be fully financially responsible from one day to another.

In short, time for any ‘play’ or ‘experimentation’ was over.

I needed to learn how to function from one day to another, despite the fact that I was in a state of deep emotional turmoil. There was no time for me to grief or process these experiences.

The result of this?

I have written more than 330 articles in the past 7 months. And I have released my first actual paid product: a book. I am also working on releasing more higher-prices products such as video-courses and a coaching program.

But financially, all those efforts have still been a failure.

The truth is, although I have been working from morning till night every single day over the past 7 months, I only made $35 in sales off my book. And I am as close to going completely broke as I’ve ever been.

Some final words:

Yes, I have been a failure at making money for all my life so far. Well, perhaps it isn’t that surprising considering my age. But then again, it doesn’t matter how old I am, I nonetheless have to live.

And I am sure that I will.

I will learn how it works eventually.

It is just a question of when. It is just a question of how fast I can learn. I it just a question of how smart I am going to approach this problem from now on.

It is just a question of getting a little bit better every single day, instead of staying in my comfort zone as I have been for years.

Here are some of the most crucial things I have already learned and am currently trying to put into practise:

• Making the shift away from thinking like a craftsman, to thinking like a business-man/entrepreneur (Further reading: The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work And What To Do About It)
• Setting up a sales funnel that will automate my marketing and sales process as much as possible (Further reading: DotCom Secrets: The Underground Playground for Growing Your Company Online)
• Being very clear and specific about every single aspect of my marketing plan (Further reading: The 1-Page Marketing Plan: Get New Customers, Make More Money, And Stand Out From The Crowd)
• Learning how to measure and constantly refine every single aspect of my marketing (Further reading: The No B.S. Guide to Direct Marketing)
• Building a business that is able to function independently of me and is automated to the core (Further reading: The Million-Dollar, One-Person Business: Make great money. Work the way you like. Have the life you want).

Lastly and most importantly, I need to make sure that I won’t quit.

I can’t allow myself to fall into a negative mindset, thinking that I will never learn how to make money. I can’t allow myself to let the pain take a hold of me, ultimately getting me to stop working towards my dreams.

I can’t allow myself to think that I am a failure and will remain one forever.

I need to keep struggling forward.

Every single day.

Tim Rettig is the author of “Struggling Forward: Embrace the struggle. Achieve your dreams”. It’s a book about the psychological journey of struggle, which every (creative) entrepreneur must pass through, before they can turn their vision into reality.