What to do if you ARE stupid.

Restored from the Empower Network archive (2011–2017), lightly edited to meet our current advertising standards. Views are the original author’s.

One of the pieces of advice that budding writers are given is to write about what you know.  So, what if you don’t know anything?  Like, how to set up a blog, or what to write about, or how to organize your thoughts, or how to monetize a blog, or all that “stuff” that online marketers care about.  So, what if you don’t?  So what!

The real question is whether you are ignorant or stupid.  If you don’t know something YET, you are ignorant.  Ignorance is 100% curable.  You can learn anything you need to know.  If you won’t learn something you need to know, you are stupid.  Stupid is a decision and like ignorance, it is also 100% curable.  I know the joke is that you can’t fix stupid, but in business, stupid can be fixed.  It is a choice.

Most of us feel stupid when we are really only ignorant.  We continue to feel stupid, because there is too much out there to learn.  It can take a really long time to learn how to build an online business and, meanwhile, we aren’t making money.   During this start-up period, there are a lot of people out there who will continue to make us feel stupid, some with good intentions and some without.

There are a lot of people who will lie to you and tell you that it is easy to be successful and you just need to spend money on a magic formula or matrix.  Then, without any work at all, you will make lots of money.  They will pressure you and make you feel stupid for not spending money immediately.  They won’t reveal their results, discourage you doing your due diligence, and don’t tell you much of anything about what you are getting for your money before you spend it.   These scammers give internet marketing a bad name and make you feel stupid.

You’re not stupid; the scammers are just very, very good marketers and very, very rotten human-beings.

On the other hand, some people you meet online will tell you that the only way to build your business is the long and hard way; they are the ones who walked 10 miles to school every day uphill in the snow both ways.  They don’t want you to be scammed, so they teach a conservative method of business-building, with a large emphasis on do-it-all-yourself.  Their intentions are good, but for a newbie, it can be overwhelming.

This method can take a very long time for you to see any success and is ultimately discouraging for most newbies, since there is usually more emphasis on the mechanics of what to do to be successful and not on creating the correct mindset to be successful (and I’ll discuss this and its relationship with failure more in future posts).

Success is not easy, but it is not walking 10 miles to school every day uphill in the snow both ways either.

There are still others who will tell you that there is another way.  By “outsourcing” the things that you do not know how to do yet, you can get a head start on building your business.  This gives you an opportunity to achieve some financial success while you are still learning.

Ask yourself a few key questions like these: What do I need to build my business quickly?  What skills do I need to accomplish this?  How can I learn these skills?  Is there a way that I can get help or “outsource” these skills until I master them myself?

To quote Forrest Gump, “Stupid is as stupid does.”

You are only stupid if you choose to remain ignorant.  You are only stupid if you spend all of your time doing things for your business and none of it thinking about whether or not you are doing the right things.   If you ARE stupid, you can choose to STOP.

You deserve to be successful.

You may not know how to be successful yet, but you can fix this.  If you would like a tip about how to do that, click on the button at the bottom of this page.