Get dirty again.
Covered in mud, blood, sweat.
To master the next thing.
Why you’re stuck
You don’t want to become a beginner again.
I just spoke at an event for Amazon sellers last week. So many sellers want to expand off Amazon onto Shopify or TikTok, but they don’t want to get their hands dirty.
They want to skip the work.
They just want to hire someone who’s magically going to double their business for them by creating converting landing pages with profitable offers and lifetime value-driving follow-up sequences. And, they want someone else to grow their Meta ads from $0 to hundreds of thousands of dollars per month.
We succeed in one area, then become divas.
We don’t want to look stupid, learn the fundamentals of the next thing, and fail until successful.
Yet, that’s what allowed us to succeed at the first thing.
How to succeed at the next thing, faster
If someone came to you and said, “I want to succeed at the thing you’re good at, but faster, what should I do?”
You wouldn’t tell him to hire a bunch of consultants and agencies and hope for the best.
You’d tell him it’s going ot take work, dedication, and focus.
You’ve seen from the top of the mountain. You know, that if he takes one step after another, stubbing his toe along the way, he’ll get to the top.
My buddy Dan has 900K followers on X, 1.4 million on Instagram, 500K on LinkedIn, and now 500K on YouTube.
How did he get there?
He mastered one platform at a time.
He got in the mud each time. He learned the game. He studied the people ahead of him, each time.
Though you must start over like a beginner to master the next thing, you’re not the same person as when you started on the first thing.
You have experience. It counts.
You know the process. You know how to succeed. You progress faster.
The 6-step path to master your next thing
- Protect the base: Don’t lose sight of what you’ve already created. Before embarking on your next area of mastery, make sure what’s already going well stays that way. Put metrics, check-ins, and, if necessary, people in place to keep the main thing thriving.
- Pick one new area to master: Water that flows through one channel carves a canyon. That same water spread across flat ground becomes a swamp. Don’t be a dabbler. Pick something, and master it.
- Become a beginner again: When you stop looking foolish, you stop learning. In the new area, you’ll feel awkward, uncertain, stupid. Good. You’re growing.
- Learn voraciously: How many conferences did you attend, books did you read, videos did you watch, experts did you seek out when you mastered your first thing? Approach this new area with the same zeal.
- Experiment: Learn from others’ experience and your own. Test, experiment, try, strive, sweat, get dirty.
- Don’t expect instant results: Bamboo grows its foundation for three years under the surface. From the surface, you see no growth, only dirt. Once it shoots, it can grow three feet in a single day. Success at anything takes time. Trust in the process. Keep watering. Results will come, I guarantee it.
See you in the mud.
—Matt