By A year or two ago there was an intern at a law firm in the UK. Like most legal interns, he was desperate to get the job at the end of his internship.
The only problem being… there were a bunch of other interns going for the same job.
His solution…
…to work his ass off so that he was guaranteed the job.
The result… he died!
Literally.
The law firm were giving their interns impossible workloads. This was being done because interns are free, the more work they gave them the more the firm could reduce their costs.
In order to get through his workload, which he wanted to do so he got the job, this particular intern was taking all kinds of caffeine pills and drinks to stay awake.
Before he died, he’d forced himself to stay awake for 5 days straight.
And then… his heart literally gave up.
It gave up on someone in their early twenties because they were working too hard!
It gave up, because this intern had the mistaken belief that the company cared about him and, if he didn’t get this job, he’d have failed.
I found this story incredibly sad.
Apart from the obvious reason, I found it sad because he made the same mistake that 99% of people who come online to work make.
He thought that the most important thing was to make money and have a successful career.
Nuh uh.
The most important thing is to have a successful life.
And that is a very different thang.
Having a lot of money and having a good life don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.
They can do, but most of the time they don’t.
First and foremost, I strongly believe that to have a successful life you need to… have the time to enjoy it!
If you’re working 24/7 then there’s no time to do the things you want to do. You can’t enjoy the friends you make, your family and the money you’re making.
After all, if you’re working to have all these things, but then don’t have the time to enjoy them, what’s the point.
So before you decide what you want to do with your online business, you should set some parameters.
The first parameter is how much time do you want to spend on it daily.
Let’s say you want to spend no more than 5 hours a day. This means you could start working at 8am and finish at 1pm Monday to Friday.
This is a reasonable starting point. Yup, we all want to get it down to one or two hours a day, but that will take time.
Five hours a day is also an amount of time that can be added into your normal working day if you need to get started while you’re still in your old job. You can do 2.5 hours in the morning and 2.5 hours in the evening.
If you want it to be less then put in less, but you’ll probably need at least 3 hours a day to get started, and build your online income to the place where it needs to be within a reasonable timeframe.
With the most important thing in place, the time you’re going to spend working so that you can still enjoy the lifestyle you want, you MUST stick to it!
It’s very easy to add in a few more hours here and there.
Don’t.
This is very important.
The whole point of a lifestyle business is to enjoy the lifestyle. As soon as you start adding in more hours, it’ll be very hard to stop and, before you know it, your lifestyle will be worse than before.
So build your business processes around the hours you have made available for it and no more.
Michael
What do you think?