Michael Wilding

Category: Productivity

  • Working to hard can kill you

    Working to hard can kill you

    A year or two ago there was an intern at a law firm in the UK. Like most legal interns, he was desperate to get the job at the end of his internship.

    The only problem being… there were a bunch of other interns going for the same job.

    His solution…

    …to work his ass off so that he was guaranteed the job.

    The result… he died!

    Literally.

    The law firm were giving their interns impossible workloads. This was being done because interns are free, the more work they gave them the more the firm could reduce their costs.

    In order to get through his workload, which he wanted to do so he got the job, this particular intern was taking all kinds of caffeine pills and drinks to stay awake.

    Before he died, he’d forced himself to stay awake for 5 days straight.

    And then… his heart literally gave up.

    It gave up on someone in their early twenties because they were working too hard!

    It gave up, because this intern had the mistaken belief that the company cared about him and, if he didn’t get this job, he’d have failed.

    I found this story incredibly sad.

    Apart from the obvious reason, I found it sad because he made the same mistake that 99% of people who come online to work make.

    He thought that the most important thing was to make money and have a successful career.

    Nuh uh.

    The most important thing is to have a successful life.

    And that is a very different thang.

    Having a lot of money and having a good life don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand.

    They can do, but most of the time they don’t.

    First and foremost, I strongly believe that to have a successful life you need to… have the time to enjoy it!

    If you’re working 24/7 then there’s no time to do the things you want to do. You can’t enjoy the friends you make, your family and the money you’re making.

    After all, if you’re working to have all these things, but then don’t have the time to enjoy them, what’s the point.

    So before you decide what you want to do with your online business, you should set some parameters.

    The first parameter is how much time do you want to spend on it daily.

    Let’s say you want to spend no more than 5 hours a day. This means you could start working at 8am and finish at 1pm Monday to Friday.

    This is a reasonable starting point. Yup, we all want to get it down to one or two hours a day, but that will take time.

    Five hours a day is also an amount of time that can be added into your normal working day if you need to get started while you’re still in your old job. You can do 2.5 hours in the morning and 2.5 hours in the evening.

    If you want it to be less then put in less, but you’ll probably need at least 3 hours a day to get started, and build your online income to the place where it needs to be within a reasonable timeframe.

    With the most important thing in place, the time you’re going to spend working so that you can still enjoy the lifestyle you want, you MUST stick to it!

    It’s very easy to add in a few more hours here and there.

    Don’t.

    This is very important.

    The whole point of a lifestyle business is to enjoy the lifestyle. As soon as you start adding in more hours, it’ll be very hard to stop and, before you know it, your lifestyle will be worse than before.

    So build your business processes around the hours you have made available for it and no more.

    Michael

  • Brick scraped balls

    Brick scraped balls

    As you know we’ve got some building work going on at the moment, in fact the first house will be finished in a little over four weeks!

    I can’t believe we’re nearing the end of part one now, part two is only a month or so behind it.

    They’re looking great, and my bank balance is looking low.

    But I’ve become good friends with the owner of the building company we’re using, and he gave me a lift to pick up our car from the garage today.

    On the way we went via the builders merchants to pick up some large specialist bricks.

    I stood one foot either side, bent at the knees (as is proper), grabbed this large brick in both hands, lifted it up and…

    …completely forgot the height of it as it grazed my balls.

    I’m not gonna lie, it hurt.

    What hurt even more was the group of people laughing at me as I did it. It turns out that everyone does this the first time they lift up one of these bricks, and they’d simply been waiting for it to happen to me.

    Bastards.

    Anyhoo, I’m used to a little bit of pain.

    Because that’s what you get when you start a business.

    It may be something that you’re feeling right now if things aren’t going your way.

    But here’s what I’ve learned…

    You don’t make the same mistake twice. I may have scraped my balls once, but I won’t do it again.

    You may make a mistake with traffic, copywriting, outsourcing or another element of your business. But once you’ve made it once, you won’t do it again and that’s how you get better!

    Michael

  • Man I’m Exhausted

    Man I’m Exhausted

    Yesterday was one of those days where everything breaks. And I mean literally everything!

    We found an issue on the build where the architects had designed the interior layout without considering the six inches of insulation they’d requested on every wall. Obviously, that meant nothing fit.

    Everything had to be re-arranged to make it work in the smaller rooms, and it took some time.

    Then I realised the email I’d sent to a blog post this morning had gone out fine, but I hadn’t pressed the Publish button on the post, so nobody could read it.

    We moved our server recently and have had on-going trouble that’s only just been resolved today, it primarily affected the data feeds going out to partners and I was chasing my tail trying torun all the scripts manually whilst outside on a building site in the pouring rain, a tape measure in my mouth and my mum on video call.

    The result?

    By the time it got to 6pm I was meant to have done the days work and tomorrows work (I can’t work today as I’m at my dad’s inquest).

    The reality?

    I’d crossed one thing off my job list.

    Now I know you’ve been in the same situation before, and when you get to the end of the day you have a choice to make. You can…

    1) Keep on working to get everything done

    Or…

    2) Call it a day, close everything, and start again tomorrow

    If you’re anything like me then you’ll usually go for option number one.

    After all, if the work isn’t done then you won’t be progressing, you won’t be making money, and everything will get behind.

    But the truth is… there’s very little that can’t wait until tomorrow.

    And if you wait until tomorrow you won’t feel tired, you won’t feel like you’re only working to try and get something done, you won’t feel like you’re missing time with your family and, ultimately…

    …it will take a fraction of the time and be much better quality.

    My advice is, from now on,to take option two when you have days like this. Close everything down, have a relaxing evening and come back to it tomorrow.

    It will still be there!

    Michael

  • Chinese prisoner begs for help

    Chinese prisoner begs for help

    Recently in Arizona, a woman found a note from a Chinese prisoner in her purse when she left Walmart.

    The note says that she is a prisoner who’s forced to work 14 hours a day under abusive conditions.

    This isn’t the first time a note like this has been found by stores who outsource a lot of their work to the far east.

    While we are trying to earn more money, live luxurious lifestyles, spend as much time as possible with our families, it’s important to remember that most of us were born into countries that give us the opportunities to do this.

    There are millions people across the world trying to escape from conditions we can’t even imagine.

    Just this weekend I overheard people complaining about how shit the NHS in the UK was and how they couldn’t find job.

    And you know what… it pissed me off.

    Because here’s the thang:

    You get FREE healthcare in the UK

    It’s unlikely to be that way forever, and in most of the world you don’t get proper health care full stop, let alone get it free.

    And, as for not being able to get a job, what they really meant was…

    They couldn’t find a job they wanted to do

    If you’ve got a home address, it’s almost always possible to find work in a western country.

    Yeah, it may be a job you don’t want to do.

    But then if you need a job you need a job. If you can pick and choose the jobs you want to do, then you don’t need it that badly.

    Rant over.

    Michael

    P.S. This is going to be a week of reflection for me. You’ll find out why later in the week.

  • A Thought On Life

    A Thought On Life