Don’t Be Upset About the Results You Got From the Work You Didn’t Do

It’s human nature.  To want what other people have.  I see and hear the sales and money being made by others in the industry, others in business,  and I want that.  But as I’ve gotten older I’ve learned that results come from hard work, smart decisions, time, and luck.  We can’t expect great things to happen if all four aren’t involved.

We have a saying around my house.  At some point you are going to have to be uncomfortable to have great things happen.  It comes up every day in talks with my daughter. In running, in order to become faster and stronger it’s going to hurt some times.  You are going to wake up in the morning and want to got back to bed.  You are going to dread some parts of running.  But I remind everyone that nobody wakes up excited to train but I haven’t met anyone that doesn’t feel great about doing it after they are finished.  Life is no different.

If you want to be a good public speaker, have a successful business, or achieve anything above the norm, the journey should get uncomfortable at some point.   Talking in front of crowds is scary in the beginning, taking on risk to grow your business makes for a few sleepless nights, and anything that you haven’t done before but want to do,  takes you to a zone that your confidence wasn’t built on and puts your mind and conscious on guard.  But that’s what success is, taking that uncomfortable and building it into been there done that and moving to the next level of uncomfortable.

Every day we talk to others about what we do here in domain investing.  To most its fascinating and exciting and they can’t believe we can make money, often good money, at what we do.  I’m sure you get the “How do I do that?” expecting you to give them a 10 minute lesson on how to make millions in domaining.  They don’t want to hear that you took your hard earned money and put it into an entity that could or could not have been worth absolutely zero.  That you worked hours and hours every day for years to learn which names you should buy.  That you spent thousands of hours of money and time meeting and developing relationships with companies and people that could help you grow your business. That’s not what they want to hear.

Every day I get emails asking me to look at names that they have for sale and 9 times out of ten they are worth no more than hand  registration.  We often get those domain portfolios on Domain Sherpa as well.  Everyone has to start somewhere.  We have all purchased bad domains, the difference is that the successful domain investors quickly realized what to buy and more importantly when not to buy.  They also found a few people they respected to help them gauge the quality of their purchases for honest and open opinion.  And the portfolio gets a little better every year. Often when I give my opinion to those emailers, they tell me I don’t know what I’m talking about yet they emailed me not the other way around.  I’ve often been wrong on my value analysis but I’m pretty comfortable that after 6 years of looking at sales results and auctions every single day that I have a pretty solid basis to make judgement.  Eventually many of these domain investors will figure it out, but like many businesses they will give up and try something else.

The people that have had the greatest success in our industry aren’t having it because their success parallels their time and effort. For me to think that I can achieve that soon is not living in reality.  How can I expect to achieve the same results on 1/100th of the effort?  I don’t, yet many do. I see how patient and confident Rick Schwartz is in his domains.  I see how hard Drew Rosener works to buy and sell names.  I see the brilliant businessman in Frank Schilling.  I see the contacts and reach of Oliver Holger.  I have gotten to see first hand the negotiation skills of Elliot Silver.   There are others that have similar success in our industry that don’t wish to be as public but they share the same journey.  A long journey that at times contained all the above.  They have worked hard, made great decisions, been part of the industry for several years, gotten lucky, and at times been uncomfortable.  Keep that in mind when you don’t get the results you were looking for but also realize that eventually it should come.