Part 26: Sightseeing on the Road to Success

Why is it that human nature so often makes us take the most difficult route to where we want to get to?

I’m thinking about business in general and Internet marketing specifically, but the more I think about it, the more it seems to apply across the board.

For example, in Internet marketing, although there are literally hundreds of different ways to make money, most people struggle. But every once in a while someone comes along who succeeds effortlessly and makes a killing. How come?

Then that successful person writes an ebook on how they ‘Twittered for Gold’, or ‘Craigslisted their way to success’, or ‘Made Five Figures With Video’ or whatever the latest thing is - and everyone with half a brain reads the book and realizes that nine times out of ten there are no big secrets being revealed - just plain common sense.

[Sorry about the extreme length of that sentence - I could seem to find a way out of it!]

You see, I think that there are people - most of us, most of the time - who get confused because we think that ‘it’ should be complicated. So we look for complex solutions, convoluted processes and contrarian systems. Something inside of our brains won’t accept that success really is simple - we have to introduce layers of complexity. And in so doing, we focus so hard on the process that we lose sight of the destination.

Its like driving - as long as we have a map and know where we are heading for, navigating the route is easy: each new road we take is a step towards our target. But as soon as we stop to think ‘oh, this is a pretty road, let’s see where it leads to’ our focus shifts away from where we want to go and on to where we are now.

The result is we get lost.

Psychologists and animal behaviourists tell us that one of the main difference between humans and animals is that our brains have evolved to be able to imagine a future. We have areas in our brain that can extrapolate from our past experiences and our present condition and create an image of the future. Animals, it seems, either lack that facility, or have it to a much lesser degree.

Somehow, though, when faced with business decisions, many of us suppress our ‘thinking forward’ skill and rely on the far more basic magpie mind (ooh, look at that nice new shiny thing…).

That constant jumping from one good looking idea to another draws our focus away from the destination and firmly on to the process.

Destination oriented thinking is absolutely crucial to your success - and mine. I don’t claim any superiority here - I’m just as likely to be sidetracked and diverted as anyone else. Maybe more so.

But recognizing the problem is a big step towards dealing with it.

So, how do those people who write the books find the ’secret systems’ that they sell - the ones that, as I said, when you read the book you think are actually blindingly obvious (except that you didn’t think so before you read the book)?

The answer is simple to explain but quite difficult to put into action.

What these people have that most of the rest of us don’t is the ability to focus on what it is they want to achieve, and then to look at whatever process they have decided to study (be that Craigslist, Squidoo, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Article marketing, or any of a hundred other methods of online marketing) with an eye to finding out what people who are already successful are doing.

There are very few original thinkers - and most of those who can and do come up with truly original concepts are too busy profiting from them to want to teach them to other people (even if they have the communication skills to do so).

No, the ones we end up learning from are the people who make it their business to understand what works. The people who have an innate ability to see below the process and to understand the route. In other words, they don’t focus on the shiny diversions, they focus on the entire map.

There is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that if you want to be a teacher, you will have to learn the difficult skill of seeing an entire journey and understand how each part inter-relates to each other part. It is a skill that we can all learn, but one that is difficult because it requires enormous focus.

The good news is that if ‘all’ we want is to be a success, then our job is really much easier. We have to learn to follow a map and to ignore the pretty roads we’ll see along the way.

Sightseeing has its place, but not on the road to success.

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