This Article Made Me $$$ Dollars!

Are you sure that’s what matters?

By Jesse Rogers

This is the one.

This is the article that’s going to put you on the map. This one will launch you into the stratosphere! Everything you’ve done up till now culminates into this magnum opus. This is the one that takes you viral.

You’ve read countless stories of “How I Made a Zillion Dollars on This One Article”, and now it's your turn. There are so many other people who have gone from zero to hero overnight on Medium. And as you read their stories you realize that some of them got very lucky.

Some of them are out of your league, sure, but with others… well, their writing style is not as thrilling as yours is, their insights are not as sharp. If they can do it, why not you?

Now is your time. Once you’re discovered, everything in your life will be different. All the doubters who have snickered at you behind your back and sometimes even to your face are going to see. They’ll see.

You can hardly sleep because you want to check your earnings. You clicked “Publish” at 9 pm last night. That’s plenty of time for good things to happen, right?

Oh my God, it got curated by a top publication!!!

It’s happening! It’s real! You were right! You’re a legit author!

Let’s check the stats.

No…

No!

Noooo!!!!

I can describe your disappointment and impatience so easily because I have exactly the same internal dialogue going on. We all do.

By this point in my life, I’ve learned how to give my inner critic a silly voice and a funny hat. I laugh him off of my mind’s stage. The voice of self-doubt has become the jester in my private court, no longer the oppressive tyrant he once was. But make no mistake, he’s still there. Always there. Taunting my every effort.

Let me tell you something that breaks my heart. As I scour through Medium looking for people to follow, I come across so many who only wrote a handful of articles in 2018 or 2019. Then they gave up. They’ve been defeated by that inner critic and it has robbed them of their dreams.

I’m writing this because I know that human nature is no different from one year to the next. There are disappointed authors reading this in 2020 who reached for a taste of success and found it surprisingly bitter. There will still be such writers in 2021. And in 2022. And in 2023.

If ever there were a niche that is “evergreen”, managing discouragement is it.

Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.

Winston Churchill

I can’t tell you with authentic credibility about how to make $$$JACKPOT$$$ articles. None of my articles have even made me more than $5 yet as of this writing. My plan doesn’t need them to. But I can tell you plenty about persisting through failures with joyous enthusiasm.

The first piece of the puzzle you might have picked up on is my tendency to put a “yet” at the end of everything.

As subtle as that seems, that one word changes everything. All by its lonesome, the heroic word “yet” nudges you from a Fixed Mindset into a Growth Mindset. So much power, in one tiny word. It is a mini battering-ram that instantly bashes open the locked doors of limitation.

If you haven’t read Mindset by Carol Dwek (yet), you should. But in the meantime here’s a 5-minute video that summarizes most of the key takeaways quite well.

My Mindset and Motivation

Any time my performance is less than I had hoped for, I dust myself off by saying “This moment is the worst my skill at that thing will ever be. My next attempt will be better.”

To the extent that I focus on numbers, it is all about growth. That’s the heart of the game. Even if I were ever at the point of making $1 million a day, it will never be enough because it’s not about the money. It’s about always getting better. It is about Constant And Neverending Improvement (what Tony Robbins calls CANI).

I can hear what you’re thinking, but no, that’s not quite the same as greed. Money is one useful metric by which to measure progress, as well as a tool by which to achieve meaningful objectives. But, again, it isn’t itself the end goal.

Impact is the goal.

My favorite interviewer, Tom Bilyeu, always asks his world-class guests what impact they want to have on the world. No matter how often I hear it, I always give that question a lot of thought every time I hear him ask it.

My creature comforts were already well met before I ever started writing. My belly will be full and a roof will be over my head no matter how any article lands. The same is true for many successful, persistent entrepreneurs and artists. Our relentless drive to overcome and to create usually does not come from a place of scarcity or desperation.

“This moment is the worst my skill at that thing will ever be. My next attempt will be better.”

I’ve encountered people who think that poverty is actually a good thing because the fear of it has the ability to motivate people to work. That intuition runs counter to scientific findings. People work because that’s what we do. What poverty does is to make people more likely to cost society through incarceration. Think about it, for every case of rags to riches, how many more were there of riches to even more riches? Or rags to prison?

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are both committed to human colonization of the stars. I admire their resolve and applaud their efforts. But that doesn’t motivate me right now.

My motivation comes from the quest to abolish scarcity and desperation altogether.

I wish to see the sociological disease of poverty vaccinated against as successfully as biological ones have been. That will take tremendous resources, as well as a transformation of billions of minds.

The transformation I speak of is of going from a culture of frantic fear to one of calm abundance. Everywhere. For everyone.

It will not be easy to realize and I’m not proposing everyone has to have the same amount, but it is vital that we all have enough to meet basic survival needs. Most of the catastrophic injustice which haunts humanity can only occur in a context of destitute poverty and abject terror. No one earning a middle-class income is selling one child into slavery to be able to feed the others.

Poverty itself is our root enemy. It is not that horrible people do terrible things and if only we eliminate or incarcerate those folks then we’ll be fine. No. Poverty is the dragon to be slain. Poverty is the root of the weed to be torn out.

What motivates me is that every word I write nudges the species ever so slightly in the direction of abundance. Every dollar I earn represents value I’ve added for someone else which exceeds that of the dollar they give me in exchange.

(Note: the Capitalism-vindicating heuristic above only works under voluntary exchange. Coercion invalidates the principle).

I’ve already used up 40 years of life, and things have gone pretty well for the most part. But today is day 1 for what remains. Over the next 40 years, my ambition is to become a billionaire by providing no less than $10 of value to others for every $1 I receive for myself. As I go along, I can deploy that wealth to cure poverty as aggressively as Bill Gates goes after malaria.

That probably sounds ridiculous to most people. I understandably have no shortage of guffawing detractors whenever I voice my dreams.

And if it were just little ol’ me alone, then fair enough, I’d agree with my critics and say that the problem of poverty is just too insurmountable. But it isn’t just me alone. I’m by no means the first and I won’t be the last to dream this dream.

The pen is mightier than the sword, and the keyboard is exponentially more powerful still. I see no reason we can’t end absolute poverty through network effects within my lifetime.

In any case, my objective in this article isn’t necessarily to persuade you that poverty elimination is the best mission to motivate you. What I’m saying is just that to keep yourself going on the days when you don’t feel like it, you need some mission. Not necessarily my mission, but there has to be some higher purpose to your effort.

He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how. Friedrich Nietzsche

Your identity stems from that. Only peg your identity to something you directly control. Don’t let some incidental fact about yourself that you can’t change be your defining characteristic, that’s so disempowering.

The best self-identity is as a crusader who is on some kind of meaningful mission. That’s the hero’s journey to find yourself on!

As for my identity, I believe that I’m a pro, and so I act like one. That means waking up at 5 am on a Sunday morning to write this whether I’m happy about how my last article performed or not. Doesn’t matter. It’s on to writing the next article.

But how exactly do you get there?

Cultivating a Rejection-Proof Mindset

When talking about self-identity, we do come to a bit of a “which came first, the chicken or the egg” problem though.

You probably agree with me that you should base your self-image under your own control and not on externals. Sure. But practically speaking, how do you go about doing that? How do you convince yourself that you’re the real deal before you have tangible evidence to back that up?

I’ve previously discussed how to reframe your perspective on rejection.

In this article, I’ll give another newer technique I’ve been incorporating. But I have to warn you — this is some really advanced, next-level, expert writer stuff.

I listen to Shakira’s “Try Everything” from the Zootopia soundtrack.

Every morning.

I’m not kidding, try it.

No no, not like that. I don’t just listen to it. I live it and breathe it in and make it real. I close my eyes and imagine I’m on stage with Shakira, as one of the tigers. I’m up there dancing along with whoever I invite to join me, like Tony Robbins, Russell Brunson, and Dean Graziosi. We’re jamming out in front of millions of people.

In the front row, I see all my mentors, all my favorites, everyone who loves me and supports me. From Marcus Aurelius to my 8th-grade math teacher, Mrs. Druker. From Robert Greene to Sun Tzu. From Oprah to Aristotle. The Dalai Lama to Elon Musk. Everyone who I look up to is there going wild, cheering us on.

As the music plays, I look over and I see the people who have laughed at me, insulted me, wronged me in any way. They see the millions of fans in the auditorium, they see me on stage, and look at the whole spectacle in complete bewilderment. And then they finally understand. Forgiven without the need for words, they join in on the fun along with the rest of us.

It doesn’t matter that so much of what goes on in my mind is impossible for technical reasons or that it’s absurd. Who cares?

The brain believes whichever reality you feed it. It has no choice. The brain cannot see, and so it must trust the eyes. It cannot hear, and so it must trust the ears. It cannot feel; the brain itself feels no pain even during surgery.

Our brain accepts its programming based on the inputs that we choose to provide it.

I’ll put it another way. Think of the brain as being like a smartphone, and the thoughts and dreams as being like the apps that run on it. I’ve described my way of uninstalling the crappy negative apps and uploading ones that are awesome.

When I’m in my deliberately constructed Zootopia fantasy, money doesn’t matter. Seeking the approval of people who aren’t trying to help me doesn’t matter. TPS reports don’t matter. Maybe I’m powerless over a lot of things, but in those 3 minutes and 22 seconds, I have complete control. I am the God of motion, love, and connection. I just make sure no one records me because externally I probably look like Elaine.

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

Friedrich Nietzsche

Notice that I don’t seem to closely identify either with the organ of my brain nor with the thoughts that it thinks. So who am “I”, then? A story for another time, perhaps.

For now, you have homework. Go break out the headphones and get busy jamming with Shakira and rocking out with your cast of both heroes and villains.

And after you do, don’t worry about how much that article you’re disappointed about earned you. Move on to writing the next one, because we have a world to save. Here are more ideas on how to do that.