The Entrepreneur’s Dark Secret

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I’m Igor Kheifets, and this is The List Building Lifestyle, the podcast for anyone who wants to build a wildly profitable email list working from home. If you’d like to make six figures, travel the world, and help people improve their lives in the process, this podcast is for you. I also invite you to claim a free copy of my best-selling book, The List Building Lifestyle: Confessions of an Email Millionaire, at igorsbook.com. Get the free book plus $3,000 bonus package that includes my best capture page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Visit www.igorsbook.com for details. And now, it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

[0:53]

I definitely had moments when I considered going back to my day job. In fact, I quit the whole internet marketing thing for about two months, about a year or so into it. I just gave up. I just couldn’t stand it anymore.

I was putting in a lot of time every day: 8, 10, 12 hours a day. I was practically sleeping next to my computer. It was in my bedroom and I pretty much ate next to the computer. I never left the house. I was just obsessed. I had the singular goal of getting this business to make me money.

But I just couldn’t figure it out. It was before I was building my list. I was chasing shiny objects. I was doing a lot of social media posting. I was blogging a lot. I was putting in a ton of effort and seeing next to no results whatsoever.

I thought about quitting every single day. I was fuelling up on motivational videos on YouTube, law of attraction books like Abraham Hicks, The Secret, Norman Vincent Peale, Bob Proctor. I was trying to continue to believe. I was trying to stay positive. But I had no tangible reasons to remain positive.

And obviously now, looking back, I understand that I was focused on the wrong assignments, the wrong things. Even if it seemed like I was putting in 12 hours a day, the actual things I was doing weren’t necessarily the most productive. I could have been reading articles for three hours straight instead of actually writing them, for example.

It was very, very frustrating. And eventually I just went back to a full-time day job. I quit internet marketing entirely. I got frustrated and tired of not seeing any results.

[3:11]

I returned to it about two months later. With a renewed sense of passion. Because I once again got a taste of what it’s like to work a day job. As simple as that. Spending time in the workforce reminded me that I will never be free if I remain there. I will never be making the kind of money I would want to be making. And I would always have to work with people I didn’t like. All of these were true, by the way.

I was working my ass off. Getting paid very little. Not the master of my time. Someone else told me when to show up and when to go home, often without considering my desires at all. On a Saturday morning, I could get a phone call from my boss saying someone got sick and he needed me to come in immediately. And I didn’t know I could say no. Maybe it’s a character thing, maybe timidness, wanting to impress or afraid of being fired. When the boss says come in on a Saturday, you say okay, and you come in on a Saturday.

[4:38]

These things would piss me off. But the last drop, by far the thing that really broke the camel’s back, was when I worked 12-hour days for a month straight. Every single day. Six days a week. I was putting in the overtime. And I thought I was going to make double the paycheck I usually made.

Eventually I got paid. I looked at my pay stub. After all the deductions: the health thing, the pension thing, taxes and whatnot. I only got a paycheck that was about 30% higher than what I would usually get.

I was practically living at work. And I was not being rewarded financially for it. When I was holding that pay stub, I wanted to cry. I honestly felt I was cheated. There’s no way you put in that many hours and this is what you get. No way.

And what was really confusing to me was how the people around me, the people I worked with, never complained about how little they got paid. Everyone got paid almost exactly the same. Maybe the managers got paid a little more. But when I eventually found out what they were making, it wasn’t a lot. At least not by my standards.

And they were literally living there. It was a big hotel.

I was like: there’s no way. There’s no way I’m spending the next 20 years doing this. I just knew there had to be a better way. There had to be a way to be free. There had to be a better way to call the shots. I was willing to settle for the exact same paycheck, but at least work on my own schedule.

Of course, when you go into business for yourself, the income potential is thousands of times greater than whatever a job can pay. You get to call the shots. You get to travel. You get to live the life the way you want to live it.

[7:06]

What really got me back into the business was just getting a taste of what it’s like to work for someone else. Being stuck working with people I hated. People I considered less intelligent than myself. A boss I considered less intelligent than myself. Getting paid next to nothing. Someone else telling me when to show up for work and when to go home. Especially when I had plans. Especially when I had a girlfriend. That was hell for me.

I felt physical pain having to go to that place of work. I physically felt sick every time I got on the bus that took me there.

So did I consider going back to the day job? Absolutely. Every single day. But eventually this very job is what pushed me right back into building my business. Because I didn’t even care at that point if it was going to take me 3, 4, 5, 6, or 10 years to figure this out. I just knew I had to. Because the next 20 years working for someone else, getting paid peanuts, being underappreciated, working with people I hated, doing something I didn’t like, with someone else bossing me around, I was just not willing to settle for that.

I didn’t see myself as the kind of guy who would take orders from some douchebag and be grateful for getting paid peanuts just to be yelled at and called in on a Saturday. Made no sense whatsoever.

And remember, I’m ex-Air Force. I had my fair share of being yelled at, screamed at, kicked around, made to do silly things just because my superior officer said so. But in the military, that experience is part of how you grow. You go through it to mature and to eat shit and learn discipline, appreciation, and respect. When it’s happening at work where you’re supposedly getting paid, there was no way I would stay.

[10:12]

So yeah, I definitely felt the desire to quit. And here’s the point of everything I just said: it’s okay to want to quit. It’s not okay to quit.

And this feeling of wanting to quit, it will not leave you. Even when you’re making money. This is the crazy part.

I keep track of my students, especially the successful ones. And over the years I’ve discovered a shocking statistic. About half, or slightly less than half, of the successful students I worked with eventually quit the business. Either started a different business or went back to working day jobs. That’s the crazy part. Even after they had made money. Making money and being their own boss was not enough to hold them back from wanting to quit.

Can you believe it?

In fact, go on the main street in your city and interview business owners. You’ll see that everyone hates their business. I used to work out of this diner bar called Moussa that had great Belgian beer and always aired football games. Perfect environment for me. The place was very successful, very popular, probably the most popular diner within a 100-mile radius. Always packed. Doing well for many years.

I once got talking to the owner about what it was like to run the place. And he said he would not wish it on his worst enemy. He told me that anytime anyone asks him if they should open a restaurant, he tries to talk them out of it. He said it’s just a very, very hard business.

Go talk to any doctor. They’ll tell you they’re tired and want to retire. Any consultant will tell you they hate their clients. Anyone who builds a successful business for some reason ends up hating the business and wanting to quit.

[13:24]

I would write this off to human nature. Because we don’t appreciate what we have. That’s why it’s important to practice gratitude and remind yourself how lucky you are. Especially if you’ve built an online business. It’s easy to lose sight of how good you have it.

I remember following Mike Dillard. Back in the day he wrote a book called Magnetic Sponsoring. If anyone has ever been in the network marketing industry, they’ve probably heard about it. It went viral. Mike Dillard became a big star in the network marketing and make-money-from-home industry. He went on to build a whole Magnetic Sponsoring brand into a seven-figure business.

And then he disappeared. When he reappeared, he started a podcast called Self Made Man, where he documented his journey building a hydroponics business. Growing your own produce at home or in your backyard. Growing tomatoes, vegetables, plants of all kinds in your apartment. Because he was really into healthy food, he wanted to develop that prototype. He ended up sinking all of his life savings into that project. Eventually it did not take off.

I remember listening to one of his interviews where he was breaking down the whole project, explaining what worked and what didn’t. And one thing stuck with me. He said he came from the information marketing industry, where you can make money teaching people, offering advice, offering information, maybe with a software element, but a lot of it you can create yourself or outsource. Not necessarily a physical product.

And he said he had no idea how good he had it. How good we all have it in this information marketing age when it comes to running a business. He went through a list of all the different investments he had to make in the hydroponics business and said: we have it so good we don’t even understand it.

And oftentimes we don’t appreciate what we have. We can only truly appreciate something in the past tense. We can only truly learn the value of something after we don’t have it. After we lose it.

[16:37]

I remember being part of the Genius Network for some time. There was a guy there who was making a million dollars a year. He was a musician, playing saxophone or something. He had an event production company that played at events with some big superstars, including Bruno Mars. He was very successful. The business was making about a million dollars a year and he was taking home about $300,000. Doing really well.

And yet when he found out what I did, he started grilling me about it. What is e-farming? How does marketing work? And I got the idea that he didn’t quite like his business. I said: look man, you’ve got a great business. Why do you even need this? He kind of shrugged and said yeah, the business is okay, and every now and again I like to play music, but I’d like to scale it down. I’m tired of it.

A successful business owner. Wanting to scale down a business that is his livelihood.

[18:01]

It’s okay to want to quit. It is not okay to quit.

And the desire to quit is not tied to your income. It’s not tied to your ability to make money. It’s not tied to your performance in the business. What it is tied to is the fact that as a business owner, the weight of the responsibility for every decision in the business, for the direction of the business, for the results of the business, is on your shoulders. That’s the tiring part. And that’s part of what we opt into when we seek financial freedom.

[18:52]

Thank you for listening to The List Building Lifestyle. Get access to previous episodes, transcripts, and other exclusive content at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com. Also remember to claim your free copy of my best-selling book at www.igorsbook.com. It explains how I made millions with list building starting from scratch, plus $3,000 worth of free bonuses including my best landing page templates, email swipe files, and traffic blueprints. Go to www.igorsbook.com now to claim your free package.