There's no such thing as an easy win.

Sorry, there's no such thing as an easy win

In today's world of social media, we are frequently targeted by ‘gurus*’ offering us an easy win - a fast-track way to achieve success. Our news feeds are littered with promoted posts or paid advertisements for products or services that will help us achieve our version of success (remember I said targeted).

From Top 5 Tips to Grow Your Business, 20 Minutes to Find Your Dream Job or 100 Leads in 2 Minutes… to How to Make 6 Figures in Your First Year as a Graphic Designer. These taglines sell massive promises for little to no effort at an affordable price!

But wait, that sounds too good to be true…

Of course, when you really dig into these ‘solutions’, you start to see all the cracks. One of the reasons those tips, shortcuts, or hacks look so attractive is because people often want to bypass the hard work and are looking for an easy win.

The truth is there’s no such thing as an easy win. Anything in life that is worth having will take time, money and/or effort to achieve.

*Note: There are some self-made gurus who will help you get success, but the difference is they aren’t promising you that it won’t require time or effort.

A litmus test of “It’s too good to be true” solutions or products

The best litmus test of whether someone can seriously deliver you this massive promise e.g. you give them $1 and they give you $3 back, is to consider why they would ask for your dollar. Why wouldn’t they just get their own $10,000 to put into their own system and make themselves $30,000 back? It just makes no sense. Granted, there might be some people out there trying to give back to people but seriously, if they're selling it as a business, it's definitely not the case. 

So why do people purchase ‘easy-win’ solutions?

People who are desperate or who feel they need some kind of shortcut to success are usually really busy working IN their business - they are too busy to work on their goals. They are vulnerable. These gurus or these methods for doing anything easily are preying on that particular vulnerability, they know these people are looking for something with a ‘golden goose.’

There's not one single reason why people should purchase or sign up to these offers. Even me, who is pretty sceptical about everything I ever read and do, can fall for these tricks myself. I get sucked into it but before I push play, I'm like, “Hang on. Let me just rationalise this for a little bit. Is this just some real slick-talking sucker who's really got me going down their sales funnel?”

It’s not you, it’s them

So in actual fact, it has less to do with the victim (the purchaser) and more to do with the predator who has these great funnels and pushes people down these paths. These marketers or salespeople have used so much trial and error to find out how to suck people into these systems. It’s not a flaw or weakness of the buyer, it’s the selling and marketing skills of the person on the other end to trick the buyer into thinking this is the best solution.

Just remember, there’s always hard work required behind the scenes

You might criticise what I’m saying with, “Well, if these guys can build a funnel system to get you to buy what they do, why can't you then replicate that system for your own product or your own service and use the same principles that they have?”

These systems and funnels that people have built aren't easy. What people fail to see is that these gurus put a lot of work into their systems early on to build up their reputation, build up some sort of system, and then find an audience that they were able to then push through their pipeline - that process is the work.

So, now that you know how to spot the ‘easy-win’ solutions that are over-promising the results vs effort ratio, what can you do instead to help fast-track your success?

No shortcuts, no hacks, here’s 3 things you need to start doing to be successful (hint: it includes hard work)

1. Find out what your version of success looks like:

First, you have to answer two deep questions about what you’re trying to achieve and define what success looks like for you.

a. What's the monetary value that you’re looking for?

Ask yourself how much you need to earn or have to consider yourself successful. Be realistic about it and remember that the answer will be different for everyone. Many people would be happy making $100,000/year while other people will want $1million a year.

b. What is the lifestyle you want? What is a comfortable life for you?

Often people say, “I want as much money as possible – millions, billions, or trillions…” but they don't stop to think about the lifestyle they want to be living while they earn that money.

Ask yourself, what does comfortable look like to you? You might want to spend more time with the family, have time to coach the kids’ rugby team, holiday at the beach for a month a year. Do you want to work 80 hours per week or only 15 hours per week?

3. Reverse engineer from “success” to “now” to define what you need to achieve to reach your goals

Consider the effort that is needed as you scale up your answer to either part of the question above. Figure out what you need to do from a financial standpoint to achieve your version of success e.g. what does your business turnover need to be?

Example: If you're wanting $100,000 a year that is a very different amount of work than if you wanted a million dollars a year. Similarly, if you want to only work 15 hours a week rather than 40 hours, it might be that you need your business turnover to be a million dollars a year so you can pay people to do the work for you.

4. Create a business plan

Once you've defined your version of success and reverse engineered what you need to achieve to get there, you can come up with a business plan. Your business plan will outline what you need to achieve and the work to be done; the strategy and tactics to achieve this. 

5. Put in the work: Success takes hard work and effort, there’s no chance or magic

Start putting in the work to actually tick off all of those action points in your business plan. You have to understand that that work is non-negotiable. You can pay other people to do the work or outsource everything in your plan but where is that money going to come from?

Many of us see these success stories from people who had what appear to be easy wins or overnight successes but we haven’t really seen how they got to that point. Whether it’s the work they’ve had to do to be able to save money to launch, build their product, or even the effort put in to get a VC to invest in their business. There's a lot of work that goes into the journey that isn’t seen by the public. Hard work isn’t sexy - overnight success stories are.

What do you think, could you spot an easy win method that is too good to be true?

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