studio non troppo : mindful design : facilitation

Photo: greefus groinks

If there’s one thing that’s easy to do these days, it would be to sell exclusive information on how to make money online. There are a few requirements:

1. a good sales letter

OK, so maybe there’s only this one requirement. [Cue the laugh track]

Now, chances are you are not currently selling exclusive information on how to make money online.  Instead, you may be interested in setting up a business to make money online.  If this describes you, and if you’re considering purchasing a book or program to help you set up such a business, caveat emptor!

But let me elaborate.

You generally don’t have to worry that you might be swindled, that your credit card will be charged and you won’t receive anything in return. This really isn’t a common problem, especially if you’ve done your homework and looked at what people have to say about the products and companies you’re considering.

No, what you need to beware of is this: the product you purchase will probably have a lot of accurate, hard-won, insightful information, but you will feel overwhelmed by the prospect of actually implementing it.

You know intellectually that if it were really that easy to be making an income online, everybody would be doing it, so it can’t be that easy.  But a well-written sales letter can suspend your reservations, making you want to believe its claims.  In addition, if you go ahead and purchase the product, you may be convincing yourself in a mysterious, semi-conscious way that it will be easy for you to implement the program and that your success will be immediate.

But it won’t work out that way.

Instead, when faced with the twin realizations that 1) the product you paid for contains valid information, and 2) you don’t have immediate (read “instant”) success, you may decide it’s not possible for you to make money online, leading you to give up.  You’ll find yourself rationalizing that this project is just too hard.

That’s the emptor I’m talking about: you thought this was going to be easy (you’re not thick, after all!), but now you believe it’s too hard, and you are disheartened.  This feeling is really what you have to beware of.

What to do?

Consider this important, but often overlooked psychological truth: other people’s achievements can seem impossible to replicate when you are not privy to the individual steps they took to get there.

Social psychologist Ellen J. Langer describes this effect in her book Mindfulness:

Our judgments about the intelligence of others can be distorted by an emphasis on outcome. In an informal inquiry, my students and I asked people to evaluate the intelligence of scientists who had achieved an “impressive” intellectual outcome (such as discovering a new planet or inventing a new drug). When the achievement was described as a series of steps (and virtually all achievements can be broken down in this way), they judged the scientist as less smart than when the discovery or invention was simply named. People can imagine themselves taking steps, while great heights seem entirely forbidding. (p. 76)

The task before you was claimed to be easy but then felt impossible. By looking at it afresh as a process requiring a series of steps, and by using failure well, you can regain the confidence you need to get to work.