When you start an online business, you’ll notice that it’s not just the tasks you do that ultimately decide your fate, but the mindset that fuels it. Being driven to succeed is a wonderful trait to possess, but there’s a difference between being driven and being desperate.
Desperation is an emotion that can derail even the best efforts to achieve your goals. It often comes cloaked in a disguise of hunger for success, but the motives behind it can be detrimental.
What Does It Mean to Work from a Place of Desperation?
When the word desperate is used in regards to an entrepreneur, it means someone who is at the end of their rope, in panic mode, worried and … desperate. It causes massive problems when you approach anything in a state of desperation, whether it’s your business, relationships, health or anything else.
So you need to know how you can put the brakes on your frantic state of mind and calmly and coolly figure out a plan. It’s hard, once the panic sets in, to slow down and find your footing, but once you do, it provides relief that you didn’t know you could experience.
With online marketing, desperation permeates our industry. We’ve all had bouts of it from time to time, and that’s not a problem. The problem arises when it becomes like quicksand and you can’t escape the feeling.
Nothing feels worse than desperation when you’re trying to succeed at something. You feel as if there’s no other choice – that if what you’re doing doesn’t work, the worst will happen.
When it hits, its impact can feel like you’re in a movie like Hunger Games – survival mode. What iffing yourself to death. Everything’s a worst case scenario and you can’t see clearly to make the best decisions.
This feeling usually stems from a need for money, but not always. When it comes to finances, it might be an urgent need, like a medical bill, mortgage payment or unexpected car repair.
But it might be that you’re just in debt and it’s growing into an uncontrollable monster with interest and penalties. For some, it’s a simple case of their retirement or social security not being enough to make ends meet, so they need supplementation in terms of income.
There’s great humiliation and embarrassment that comes with being in a state of financial desperation. They’ve overspent or not planned well and need to recover a sense of stability.
The Biggest Danger of Working While Desperate
When you’re desperate is when you’re likely to make stupid or unethical mistakes that can haunt you – in both your personal and professional life. With business, it can take a toll that you never recover from if you’re not careful.
Think about the scenarios that can happen. When you’re desperate for every penny that comes in, you don’t thoroughly think through the decisions you’re about to make – you only see dollar signs and profit potential.
But you have to be careful to consider everything in transactions and tasks that you embark on in this business. If you don’t consider the opposite of what you want to have happen, then you might get blindsided.
You can get preyed upon by unscrupulous joint venture partners. There are some in this industry who can smell a desperate newbie from a mile away. Like a shark, they circle around and lure you into their turf so they can devour you financially.
Some will make you do all the work, then not pay you what you earned. Others will brainstorm with you (with you providing most of the ideas), then quit on the JV partnership, take your idea and run with it.
You were openly sharing because you admired or envied that marketer, seeing their success, and you wanted some of that for yourself. But even the top gurus in this business can suffer from a lack of ethics, so you have to be careful.
You can also get ripped off by service providers. Some will say they’re going to charge you one price, but end up jacking up the cost of a service at the last minute – maybe shortly before your launch.
They’re basically holding your deliverables hostage, knowing you’re desperate enough to pay it so that you can launch without a hitch. You want to ensure you have plenty of time, word of mouth recommendations, and confidence in the provider so you’re not putting yourself in a vulnerable position.
You can more easily get scammed by vendors selling courses, tools and coaching. People will tell you to read the fine print, and that’s a great idea. But even fine print can’t protect you in some cases.
Desperation will make you buy things you don’t need. It will make you listen to the phony urgency warnings and make you believe that if you don’t get that product or tool now, you’ll never succeed.
There are business coaches who will lure you in with a promise for a small investment, then when you have let your guard down, they’ll talk you into mortgaging your home, taking out a big loan, or charging up your credit cards to afford their coaching.
Don’t let this happen to you. You have to shop smart and avoid being desperate when you’re learning this business. There are players in this game eager to capitalize on your desperation.
The Other Form of Desperation That Impairs You
Not everyone is desperate because of immediate financial needs. Some are desperate for purpose. They’re not ready to retire. Or they want to leave a legacy. Some are aging, so the desperation is time based.
Having a purpose in life is imperative to many individuals – especially if they spent most of their lives immersed in a career that didn’t fulfill them personally, or that didn’t provide enough stimulation for them.
There are many forms of desperation that aren’t directly tied to immediate money needs. Sometimes, it’s just a matter of desire. You want to work for yourself and avoid going back to a corporate gig.
If you can’t stand working for others, like an irritating boss or coworkers who burden you with some of their unfinished work, then it might light a fire in you to be able to quit that job and work for yourself permanently.
It may be that your family doesn’t believe you can do it, so you want to show them that you have what it takes. It has nothing to do with cash needs, but it’s still something that can make you work in a state of desperation.
When you start to notice you feel panicked when working, or working with a sense of urgency, slow down and make a note of what it is you’re feeling. You want to know what’s driving you in this moment.
What should be driving you is a desire to achieve your goals, or a desire to help others find the solutions they need, which you can provide either as a vendor or as an affiliate marketer.
If it’s something else, like avoiding criticism, paying a bill before something gets cut off, or something else that reeks of desperation, make sure you don’t allow that to infest your decision-making abilities.
Being desperate brings out the worst in people, not the best, You’d think it would drive people to make good decisions that further their success, but it often does the complete opposite.
Next time around we will look at: Avoiding Learned Helplessness Through Personal Responsibility.