Rant | Don’t Buy Into The Over Simplification Of Success | Loren Feldman Of 1938 Media Is Wrong
March 26, 2007
Loading ...
I’m an optimist and I like to help companies and individuals be successful with their online marketing efforts. Occasionally though, I feel it’s important to look at what other people are saying about success online and off, look for deeper meaning, and warn customers of potential pitfalls regarding making money online and off.
I was recently outraged by a video blog post by Loren Feldman of 1938 Media claiming that all the sole reason some bloggers have larger audience levels was from hard work and then he goes on to rant about the reason why people make lots of money online comes from working harder than everyone else. Hard work is important, but absolutely not the sole (or even primary) reason for success (online or off) and anyone who claims it is naive at best.
Loren Feldman uses mass oversimplification to insult his audience and exaggerate the link between hard work and profitability.
Opportunity in Early Market Adaptation
First let’s talk about bloggers. Most of the popular bloggers were EARLY MARKET ADAPTERS. Meaning they were blogging when most people weren’t, so over the years they were able to build up a large audience. Note: this is why if you’re not blogging now you should start immediately; for many industries blogging is in it’s infancy and by starting now it’ll be a lot easier to gain an audience and build an online presence.
Even some of the recent most popular blogs had industry connections (like Techcrunch) before they ever started - connections many people don’t have.
You can build a new blog and get a large audience, but you’re going to need to use all your resources and it’s going to take more then just hard work. Some of the factors of online success are beyond your control, like hitting the right opportunities, having people like your writing and having a message or theme that sets your site / blog apart in a competitive marketplace. Creativity, market saturation, time available to devote to the project, competitiveness of your industry-all these and more contribute to one’s success in their chosen market.
Hard work has a smaller ROI in an over-saturated market place.
If you’re trying to compete in an over-saturated marketplace, then hard work offers much return and may not contribute to financial success at all. Take acting as an example.
That market is over-saturated. Lots of a lots of people want to be actors, but there aren’t many job opportunities comparatively in this field. You can be a GREAT actor and work 60+ hours week (I know many actors who do) and never make it, while other, less talented, less hard working individuals may make more money than you and be more famous. Why? Success in that industry is dependent on a lot of factors other than hard work and talent. Because the market is full of competition, hard work and talent by themselves don’t set you apart. The same holds true FOR MANY INDUSTRIES.
The “fate” or “right time and right place†factor
People devote their lives to buying and selling stocks. The stock market is a chaotic system; this means no person or computer can accurately predict what it’s going to do for any major length of time ( if you have an aptitude for math take chaos theory sometime, it’s fascinating!). I could take $10,000, invest it tomorrow, and by just picking a stock that “looks good” to me, potentially make 10,000 times my investment in 5 years. In fact, this scenario has to happen to so many people every 5 years, because some stocks grow that much.
Now say that someone was me. Does that mean I worked harder at the stock market then everyone else? Does that mean I have more stock-picking talent then all the professional stock brokers? Of course not! It would mean I picked the right stock at the right time and made a lot of money; you can’t read more into it then that.
Real World Success
The real world is almost (potentially is we’re not sure yet) infinitely more complex than the stock market, which in itself can’t be mathematically predicted and jumps all over the place. So don’t think success is easily summed up in such a complicated environment. Life is complicated and making it on top is dependent on a LARGE number of variables with only one of them being hard work; that’s reality, not the stuff Loren Feldman is slinging. Thanks for listening to my rant. I wish you all online success.
[tagssuccess, blogs, blogging, Loren Feldman, 1938 Media[/tags
You are spot on in this article. Thank you for writing it, and keep blogging