The Suicide Hotline

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Jonathan: Welcome back to another edition of List-Building Lifestyle with your host, the master list-builder and entrepreneur, Igor Kheifets. Igor, before I let you say a word I’m going to hijack the beginning of the show…no, shh…don’t say thing! But I want to go ahead, and we’ve gotten so many great reviews on iTunes that I just want to give a shout out to ‘NYtom88’. He gave us 5 stars and the title of the review is ‘Igor is the real deal’, and here’s what Nytom88 says –

‘As one of Igor’s coaching clients, let me tell you, he knows what he’s talking about. Joining/learning from Igor will be one of my best business decisions of 2016. Hands down. In my opinion this podcast is gold. We should have to pay for this over the shoulder content. Igor, you are the man and I can’t wait to listen to more of this podcast!’

How about that!

Igor: Man, I’m starting to dig this whole thing, Jonathan. This whole gig of just, you know, coming in, running my mouth for 20 minutes at a time, having people praise me, I’m getting addicted to it.

Jonathan: Uh-oh, uh-oh! Yeah, Igor is going to get BIG, bigger than it is, huh?

Igor: Yeah, bigger than it is. I thought no way.

Jonathan: Nice.

Igor: It’s already the size of Manhattan anyway.

Jonathan: Wow! Wow, awesome, man. So what do you have in store for us today?

Igor: Well, Jonathan, I want to talk about hopes and expectations today and, you know, have you ever gotten your hopes just crushed?

Jonathan: Many times.

Igor: You know, when I got online the first time and they told me it’s going to be super awesome, I really just wanted to just get a website together. Like I said I joined and my first thing was GDI, Global Domains International, which is like a $10-per month a website, a host/hosting thing where you would recruit your friends and family and get a dollar in passive income every month and they’d recruit their family and we’d all get paid cool passive income. You could making like 3 grand a month or something very, very quickly.

So anyway, when I joined this ideal outcome I was given, I was painted, right, it was so awesome. You know, I could already see myself just staying in bed until noon, making big money, not going to work or to school and just living that live it up lifestyle. But then I learned the truth and it turns out this business wasn’t anything like I was told it’s going to be, and so I was crushed for a little bit, but then I got so [03.00.1] busy that I just, you know, I didn’t have time for that and eventually just like I shared on the last show, it was only three and a half years later that I started making money.

But I want to just kind of briefly discuss how this experience is very similar to a lot of people I talk to today, you know, almost a decade later and how these things never change, how we all have, you know, we have these high hopes for this business and how we get into it and how we just sometimes when we learn it’s not what it was all it’s cracked up to be, we just want to breaking kill ourselves, because of all the shame and frustration. Not to mention, of course, like if you actually had the audacity to brag to your friends and family and say ‘Hey, you know what? I’m going to do this internet gig! I’m going to try and make money from my home, you know, in my underwear from y kitchen table!’ They’re going to be the first ones to stick a finger in your face and tell you that ‘You know what? You’re just full of it and you’re just wasting your time and you’re an idiot for even tying!’

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: So anyway this is really important I think, because we will learn a great deal of, you know, a great deal about success in general, not just in business but in life too. I mean, getting our hopes crushed, we can really take it in two different ways.

One way we can take it is just as more motivation and keep persevering, keep pushing through. This is what successful people do, but there’s people out there who take it in a way that is just not right. For example, Jonathan, did you know that in Paris in France they have a special hotline for Japanese tourists that travelled all the way from Japan to see the Eiffel Tower and the Moulin Rouge and all the good stuff Paris has to offer and they just were not impressed that, you know, Paris did not live up to their expectations and so there’s a hotline you can call if you’re a Japanese tourist in Paris where they will help you just, you know, deal with the psychological and emotional breakdown you’re going through because you’re so disappointed. And now…

Jonathan: You made that up, Igor, right?

Igor: No, I kid you not. It’s a real thing, and here’s why they created this hotline. Turns out there were Japanese tourists that arrived in Paris, you know, took a stroll around, were not impressed and killed themselves.

Jonathan: No…

Igor: Yes. So their expectations, you know, of Paris. They just, you know, Paris did not live up to their expectations they said and that’s how they reacted. Now obviously this is an extreme, like a ridiculous extreme, but it is true and people tend to do stuff like that. In fact, we tend to do the exact same thing online where we commit, you know, this mental suicide where when the first opportunity we join does not live up to the expectation, we just give up or we just kill the business altogether, which I think is the [06.00] wrong way to go about it because it’s like you don’t get married to the first girl you date, right.

So the same way, you usually don’t succeed with the very first opportunity, you know, you join – with a few exceptions, of course. I mean, I married the second girl I dated, but even then I did not tell her about it, you know, there for a while up until like we were married like 3 years into or something. But, yeah, you should not expect to make millions and to achieve financial freedom on the very first attempt. And you should always keep your expectations down. You know, I have a lot of clients who approach me believing that they found the Holy Grail of marketing, that they’re run some traffic with me because it’s so awesome, because everybody else says it is and they’re going to convert and make a ton of money. They’re going to basically take all this profit and invest right into the next promotion, and so now they have this self-perpetuating list-building/money-making machine.

And they get so discouraged when their first attempt does not work that they either give up on the traffic source altogether or it takes them like a whole while to recover. You know, some of them actually want to blame me for it, which is totally fine.

Jonathan: Wow.

Igor: But, you know, the point I’m making is that the expectations, like this picture they paint for themselves is so ridiculously perfect that when the reality just hits them in the face and they see it’s not like they wanted it to be all sorts of crazy things happen and all hell breaks loose. So that’s why, for example, we tend to kind of tone down the expectations sometimes when we see a client that’s like ridiculously excited. And I get this all the time where people just approach me as if they literally have discovered some sort of like Godlike entity of traffic-generation. I assure you guys nothing about me is Godlike and nothing about what we do is Godlike. We’re just normal guys. We just spend a lot of time optimizing, tweaking and trying to get the best leads for our clients. That’s pretty much it. There’s no, you know, voodoo magic here.

And so when you’re starting out with this traffic source or any traffic source or any business opportunity or really any endeavor, any new relationship, alright, you should always keep your expectations way down, because that’s actually a really good recipe to always stay calm, cool and collected, make the right decisions and also not get too upset and too stuck on not getting the desired results.

Jonathan: You know what, Igor? I think it was Warren Buffett who said that the secret to being happy in business or being happy in life is to have low expectations.

Igor: Yeah, and I learned this early on in business, but then, of course, I had to

learn this again in relationships, and you wouldn’t believe, like, even with, especially, especially with my spouse. I mean, Anastasia and I, we met. The first couple of years were really difficult, but eventually I [09.00] learned to tone down my expectations and she had to do the same, because both of us realized we’re not changing.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: We’re just not going to change, so we might as well change our expectations of each other, and I had the same thing happen with my team and team members. You know, I employed and over time I think like 20 people at this point and I only have now 5 working with me, and the issue was always how I would put ridiculously high expectations on people. And obviously very few lived up to the expectations, so I was always frustrated, always unhappy and unsatisfied about their performance. And so eventually I learned to, you know, to an extent I learned to tone down my expectations, but of course I’d still demand performance, but, yeah, it’s I think…I think that’s a really, really good tip, just not expecting much and then you’re surprised when you get a lot.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: That’s like, you know, it’s just a really, really, really sweet place to be in when you’re running an online business, because, I mean, honestly, Jonathan, we are operating in an industry full of bloated promises, you know, full of hype, full of stuff like that, and so if we just buy into every single ideal outcome, then, man, we’re going to end up being frustrated very quickly.

Jonathan: Oh, yeah, you’re going to need a hotline…thought for a nice business – Internet Marketer Hotline: ‘Oh, you’re depressed? You sad? Call Igor.’

Igor: ‘Scammed by the guru? Yes, call us. We will fix that.’ But all joked aside, Jonathan, honestly, if our listeners learned to tone down their expectations, the other thing that’s going to happen is that the action, the approach, the effort they’re going to be putting into their endeavors is going to be completely different, right.

Jonathan: How so? Tell me how they would approach things differently?

Igor: Well, basically if you had a few perfect expectations that were crushed in the past, imagine – how are you supposed to take action on the next one knowing that the first, you know, the two or three or five or ten did not end up being successful? You’re probably going to super freaking discouraged. And a lot of time is find that even, you know, myself included, by the way, I find that people tend to just either take lousy action or not take any action at all in order to avoid this feeling of failure. Right, so you might as well just not take action altogether, because they’ll fail anyways?

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: So just an easier way to get out of it? But at the same time if your expectations are pretty, you know, pretty low, you’ll still have goals, but like your expectation of achieving those goals is low. Like you don’t get discouraged with bad outcomes and, you know, 99% of the time you get bad result, but it’s a part of getting through those results and moving forward.

Like I read in the book Psycho-Cybernetics I think, they said that in order to achieve a goal a man [12.00] must become like a missile, like a homing missile, because a homing missile, the way it operates, it actually you set the course for it and it starts, it just flies out and then it just makes corrections. So it flies straight, it realizes it’s not on course and it makes a correction and then again and again and again. And it does it like a million times until it hits the target. So it always compares itself to where it’s supposed to be versus where it is right now and making corrections to hit that target. And so you can say that a homing missile fails like a million times before it hits the target.

Jonathan: That’s right.

Igor: But only thanks to those failures, it’s the concept of how it operates, you know, we operate the same way. Oftentimes, getting started we have no idea how to reach the target. We just know what the target looks like. We just…we don’t know what to do about it. So we start attempting things and then we have to correct our course and keep going and keep going and keep going. And so, obviously if your expectations are super high, you’re going to get discouraged really quickly, but if they’re like modest, then you will go on. It’s like, you know, running a marathon. You just go on for a long, long time without giving up.

Jonathan: Yeah, man, I like the idea of the course corrections. The other thing that I think helps with that where you’re saying set the bar low, that’s okay. I like that, but also I think celebrating smaller wins is also like that course correction, like ‘Oh, I lead, you know, I got this score. I got this one.’ Little smaller wins on your way will help keep you motivated also.

Igor: Yeah, absolutely, and every single failure or attempted fail basically gives you a lesson, give you some sort of experience.

Jonathan: Data.

Igor: Yeah, a lot of times people ask me how am I able to write like say three emails a day to my list or something. Right? They’ll ask me ‘Igor, how do you know what you write about? You know, your emails always seem to make sense and blah, blah, blah.’

Well, a lot of it is experience, like a lot of it is just the failures I made, you know, the failures I’ve gone through, especially in the first three and a half years of trying to break through.

So everything that happens to you is a good thing from now on. With, you know, listening to the podcast, you now have a great advantage over everybody who doesn’t. If anything that happens to you is a good thing, everything, even the best stuff and the failures, it pushes you towards the goal, pushes you towards the end result whether you like the way it’s happening or not, and if you see it that way, life becomes much easier to live.

Jonathan: Yeah, I like that. Constant motion, right? I think that’s where people get stuck. They get zapped and then they just want to stand still. The real way to get through that is just to keep moving forward.

Igor: Oh, yeah, and the more successful you become, the more constant you need to be, like the more action you have to take. Like I find it very interesting how people want to build an automated business, for example, but there is not much consistent effort they put [15.00] into their systems or how, you know, they want a promotion like a solo ad or something, they’ll make a few sales, but then they do nothing on the backend.

And so when they come to me and they’re like ‘Hey, Igor, I ran a…you know, my solo finished 10 days ago. I made only two sales.’ I’m like ‘Ok, and what have you done in the meanwhile in the backend with the leads you’ve generated?’

‘Um…nothing.’

Jonathan: Ugh…

Igor: ‘Why not?’ yeah. ‘Why not?’ ‘Well, I don’t know. Just, I just didn’t do anything.’ So, you know, this consistency, I mean, the principle of consistency in itself is a major, a major success lesson everybody needs to kind of take onboard right now, because if there is one common theme to pretty much everybody who is successful, that is, of course, how they wake up in the morning and they’re at the grindstone. Even, Warren Buffett. I mean, the guy is like 118 years old or something. He’s still, you know, he wakes up and he puts on the suit and he gets to the computer and he starts working.

Jonathan: Yeah, that’s it, man. I love it. So…wow! We were all over the place here. I think this is a very valuable episode. In fact, I think you guys should stop it and listen to it again, because there’s a ton in here to keep you motivated and moving forward. What do you have coming up next time, Igor?

Igor: Well, next time I want to talk about one of the, I think, the only greatest stories, literature stories that inspired me early on, Moby Dick, and how, you know, what I learned from it actually allowed me to break through as far as getting clients, you know, getting those big whale clients if you will.

Jonathan: Look at this guy. We went, you know, we’ve bene doing internet marketing, and now you’re going into literature…oh boy! I can’t wait. Alright, so that’s a wrap for List-Building Lifestyle, epsiode-10. Thank you, Igor, and thank you listeners for tuning in. we will be back in your earbuds next week.

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