Years pass by in the blink of an eye.
Today, it’s been 5 years since the first article on LMM was published and the years since have been a blur.
A lot has happened in the 5 years:
- I became a millionaire (Thank you Affiliate Marketing.)
- I lost 2 grandparents. I still miss them very much.
- A global pandemic shut the world down and killed many businesses. I stopped managing my legal and tax consulting firm (run completely by family now) to focus entirely on online businesses.
- I worked 10 to 15 hours a day for many months straight to build up several businesses at once while growing the affiliate marketing co. and building the LMM audience.
- I founded Teach Yourself Crypto – the best crypto course on the internet.
- I funded and founded Copyright Samurai, a legal services company that makes sure your digital products don’t get pirated (solving my own problems).
- I almost finished a completely self-taught degree in Computer Science from the OSSU – I have only a handful of courses left to do. I can only study part time and sometimes need to take many months off at a stretch to focus on business. I’m about 85% through. I should be able to finish it in about another year.
- Started the Unapologetic Truths Podcast (44 episodes released!).
- About to launch a new SaaS company that will help you repurpose your tweets into videos for TikTok, IG reels, YouTube Shorts, and more. If you are interested, join the waitlist here.
I detailed my “origin story” in the post I published when LMM turned 3 years old and I will not repeat it here. In the origin story I talked about growing from nothing – being a nobody online and then working to become a somebody.
In this post, I want to talk about a few important things.
How to Handle Success
Success naturally brings in the same things that kill success – comfort and satisfaction.
When you make more money than 99% of humanity, you feel good.
You buy nice things. You don’t worry about bills. You have everything you want and need.
The incentive for working hard and putting in the effort is much lower that it was when you were a broke kid with no money and no nice things.
Most people in this situation essentially give up and start to decay. They start “chilling” more and stop putting in the work. They rest on their laurels and think they’ve already made it.
You will see this in many older businessmen who are “taking it easy” as their younger and more energetic competitors steal the market from under them.
The way to handle this is to remind yourself that you have not achieved much. Yes, it’s good to acknowledge your success, but keep in mind that the road ahead still exists.
Chandragupta founded the Mauryan Empire when he was 20 years old, Alexander destroyed the Persian Empire at 32 years old, and John D. Rockefeller became the richest man on Earth despite growing up in poverty.
There is a LONG way to go regardless of how much success you’ve achieved and you must always have an eye on the future.
If you get too happy about your past achievements and slow down – my friend, you are finished. Slow road to obscurity for you.
Not that there’s anything wrong with coasting after a certain age by the way. For many people, slowing down is the right thing to do. It’s a choice that you need to make for yourself.
For the rest of us – full speed ahead!
Don’t Get Too Comfortable
Comfort kills drive.
When you sleep on a soft bed, have enough money coming in from a job to pay the bills, and have plenty of food in the fridge to stuff your mouth with – you end up in what I call the comfort trap.
You are so comfortable that you do not want to exert yourself. You start spending an hour on the bed after you wake up. You start eating whenever you feel hungry instead of eating when it is time to eat. You work your job and you get your money at the end of the month.
Soon, all your dreams of starting a business, being fit and strong, and gaining power and influence in the world fade away. “Maybe someday,” but not today, because you’re too comfortable today.
After all, why bother? The latest globohomo movie is on Netflix. Just watch that with popcorn.
Look, time flies. Yesterday I published the first LMM article. Today, I’m writing this one. Tomorrow, I’ll be penning down the 10 year update.
No matter how you fill your time, you are growing older. Nothing changes if nothing changes. You just become 1 day closer to death.
If you take a wolf from the jungle and start feeding it meat day and night, do you think the wolf is going to want to go back to the jungle and hunt? No, it’ll stick around for the free and safe meals and take it easy. Soon it will lose it’s hunting skills and edge. Nature’s predator will become a fat useless glutton because of the easy food and a lack of hardship.
If you want a nice kick in the ass, remove the comfort from your life so you’re actually motivated to do something with your life. And set a simple target you want to achieve.
It could be something as simple as “I’m going to make 1 Million dollars from the internet” or a set of goals – whichever suit you.
You then take away the comforts that make you stagnant until you’ve achieved said goals.
- Sleep on the floor.
- No showering with hot water.
- No Netflix, video games, porn, or TV.
- No drinking and no drugs. No free dopamine.
- No eating whenever you feel like it. Have set meal times. No snacking.
- No being weak. Follow a regular strength training schedule. High testosterone = high motivation.
- Any other comforts that you are over-indulgent in. You might even delete WhatsApp from your phone if you waste too much time on it.
For a fully structured self-improvement program, get a copy of Live Intentionally.
This will free up a lot of time and if you are a male – your natural drive will make you want to do something with it.
The testosterone in our blood wants us to conquer. Most men just dull themselves with comfort. Take away the comfort, put in the work, and see the man you are capable of becoming.
Remember – comfort is not bad. But too much comfort is. Especially comfort you haven’t earned from your own success. Most of are born with too much unearned comfort.
The ancient man had to think of where his next meal came from. The modern man only worries about what’s going to happen in the next episode of F.R.I.E.N.D.S and his hardships are limited to what his friends think of him. Oh no does that girl like me or not? My life so hard.
Opportunities Multiply as They are Seized.
They Die When Forgotten.
People are of two types – people who get things done and people who complain about why things can’t be done.
People who act on whatever opportunities they have find that more opportunities come their way. People who complain all the time find more things to complain about.
Everyone has opportunities in their life. Especially people who can read and write English and have an internet connection.
Do you think there will not be any more billion dollar companies? Any more successful blogs, YouTube channels, Twitter accounts, SaaS companies, ecom companies, niche sites, or anything else? Of course there will be many more.
You cannot both say there are no opportunities while at the same time acknowledging that millions of successes are yet to come in the future. You could be the one to start one of them.
Just pick an opportunity – anything. Even something simple like Twitter or YouTube and try to build it. You’ll find more ideas start coming into your head.
The more opportunities you take, the more you will find.
- I had a legal and tax consulting firm (brick and mortar).
- I found that I can make a lot of money selling accounting and email software to my clients as an affiliate.
- This made me want to learn more about affiliate marketing and I started writing reviews and promoting useful products and software on the internet.
- Then I started LMM as a blog because I saw many other people write successful blogs. I wanted people to hear what I have to say.
- To promote the blog I started the LMM Twitter account. That twitter account did quite well from the get go (currently at 350K followers).
- Then I heard about this crypto thing everyone wanted to pay me in. So to learn more, I built a crypto education company.
- I found that some thieves were pirating LMM products, so I built an intellectual property protection service to help content entrepreneurs protect their digital products from theft.
- I wanted to grow beyond Twitter so now I’m building a SaaS company that automates just that. It takes your content from Twitter, turns it to video, and sends it to YouTube shorts, TikTok, and Instagram reels. (If you are a content creator, join the waitlist here.)
The point I’m trying to make is, I took an opportunity from the brick and mortar world, and as I executed it, more paths opened up and I seized them. When I seized more opportunity, even more opportunities opened up.
This is how life works. When you make use of whatever ideas you have (even simple things like trying to build a social media account), new ideas come your way.
Most people just keep complaining about not having a business idea or blame the government or whatever other excuse they want to make, and they find even more reasons to complain because they’ve trained themselves to be complainers, not executors.
Are you literally telling you can’t think of any business idea despite you interacting with businesses day and night?
Every app on your phone, every YouTube channel you regularly watch, every big blog you read, every serial author you read, every restaurant you go to, ever Uber you sit in – all businesses.
Are you telling you can’t come up with anything despite being surrounded by businesses? I’m starting to think the problem isn’t a lack of opportunity. The problem is you.
The Importance of Starting Young
The world of business is much easier to get into when you are young and have fewer responsibilities.
You can try out new ideas without high expectations and failures don’t hurt you much (there is plenty more time and energy). Your 20s are ideal to start some kind of an online business.
As you become older, your responsibilities increase. You get married, you have children, your health and energy levels decline, and your costs and standards of living go up.
Your opportunity costs also increase. When you make a low salary from a job at 21, it’s not a hard decision to focus on building a business.
When you make a high salary at 41, suddenly taking time away from your career and family to work 40 hours a week on a business which is currently making $500 a month feels like a dumb choice.
Your wife and children hate you for not giving them time because you’d rather work on your $500 a month business even though your salary is high enough to support everyone already.
Your 20s are perfect for starting a business. You have extremely high energy (enough to work a job and work on a business at the same time without burning out), you have no real responsibilities other than yourself (no wife, no children, and your parents are still healthy), and you have no financial opportunity costs.
At worst, you might fail and would have to get a job – which is extremely unlikely because if you try 10 business ideas, 1 is bound to succeed.
If you are in your 20s, make online business a priority. You will hit 30 sooner than you think. Time flies. There is no “maybe someday”. You start today because if you don’t, you’re another day late.
Pick either The Art of Twitter or The Complete Web Design Course and get going!
Talk to Your Family Every Day!
You will miss them when they are gone. And you will regret the time you spent working hard while neglecting your family.
This is not going to be relevant to my Indian brethren as we live with our families, but many of you live alone. Think about it – how often do you meet your family? Twice a year? (For many it’s once a year at Christmas).
How many more years are your parents going to live? 20? 30? If you meet them twice a year, that’s only 40 to 60 more meetings you’ll have with them.
That’s not good at all! Call your grandparents and your mother and father. They miss you. They act like they don’t because they don’t want you to feel like they are a burden on you, but they do. So call them.
Let them know you love them, because you’ll wish you did when they are gone.
Do some cool shit!
While you’re working hard – try and find some time to do some fun stuff.
Ideally you want to go out at least once or twice a week to keep life fun and also maintain your social skills.
I don’t mean indoor stuff like video games – I mean cool shit like climb a mountain, surf some waves, go on a long drive, explore a new location, book a flight and do a solo trip – some cool and interesting shit!
There’s no point in having money and being successful if your life is boring and dull. Get out there once or twice a week and do some cool stuff – anything outdoors that you enjoy.
Join the Revolution!
We’ve come to the point where saying you believe in family makes you a “right wing troll”.
Wanting to be fit makes you fatphobic, and not wanting to have sex with glorified eunuchs makes you a transphobe.
Join the revolution. The revolution is simple – you listen to what makes sense and not to mainstream media nonsense.
Lift weights, eat a lot of protein, make lots of money on the internet, and show the finger to the pansy journalists telling you to eat grasshoppers and sleep in a pod.
Like it or not, being a sane, strong man is now becoming a counterculture. If you want to be a strong, rich, handsome man who other guys want to be and girls want to be with – you’re in the right place.
It’s time for you to kick the pansies to the curb and join the revolution. If you’re reading this blog, you’re already in.
Until next time.
Your man,
Harsh Strongman
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