Erik Kruger is like many of us who became entranced by the idea of lifestyle design. He read Tim Ferriss's Four Hour Workweek and felt the desire to work as few hours as possible so he could "run around and do other things" with all his extra free time.
So he tried to build businesses that let him live that lifestyle. His first attempt was a local freelance network, which fizzled out. He also tried to create web directories for physical therapists, gyms, and models, but those never gained traction either. He describes all of these unsuccessful projects as his "graveyard of domains" because of all the sites he tried and failed to build.
These failures taught him a valuable lesson. When he started out, his main goal was trying to make a lot of money while working as few hours as possible. But over time, he discovered he was focusing on the wrong thing.
Luckily for Erik, our failures often lead to our greatest success. His success came in the form of Better Man, a site dedicated to helping men change their behaviors to become more productive, habit driven, and successful. This project has grown into a thriving community of like-minded men driven to make the most out of life.
In this episode Erik talks about the lessons we can learn from failure, why you should let your principles guide you, and the importance of creating value for your audience.
Here are three things you can learn from Erik:
We are all afraid of failure. No matter what level you've reached, how much money you've made, or how much success you've achieved, there's still something in the back of our minds that's deathly afraid of failure. It's a part of human nature.
The difference between those who continue to find success and those who give up is that successful people learn from their failures. Erik failed many times before hitting on Better Man, but these failures taught him valuable skills.
"When I look back, it's really embarrassing to talk about them, but they taught me incredibly valuable skills, to the point where Better Man is what it is because of the digital skills that I built up during all these horrendous sites."
Your moments of failure might seem frustrating in the moment, but they can also teach you valuable lessons.
"It's always nice to look back and know that you've gone through all these things and at the time you might be frustrated and looking back you might think of them as failures, but they actually taught you so much."
The biggest lesson Erik learned was changing his mindset. When he started, he was enamored with lifestyle design and let that dictate his decisions. But once he shifted his effort towards something he was passionate about everything changed.
"Probably the biggest mistake that I made, and I don't want to say I regret it, but I wish my mindset was a bit different, is that, during that same time lifestyle design became this buzz word and everyone was flocking to this idea of building a business while working extremely few hours a week and being able to just run around and do other things the rest of the time and I got really hooked by that idea, and I wish I didn't. I wish I'd just stuck to working hard and not fell into the trap of wanting to put in as few hours as I can, but trying to get maximum results from it... A big deal with what I teach is that you want to put in as little effort as possible for maximum return but it doesn't mean you're not still working ten hours. It just means those ten hours are more focused and working on the correct things and not just things that are keeping you busy."
Often times our biggest challenge isn't that we don't know what to do. It's that we forget what we stand for. We stop letting our principles guide us in the right direction. We follow those shiny objects hoping that this new tool or technique will help us break through. But shortcuts rarely work.
What we need are some principles to guide us. Better Man's guiding principle is to take responsibility for your life.
"I think what we all just want is that magic wand... that's just going to figure out everything for us, but you have to go back and actually start taking responsibility for your life, and once you start doing that, then... things start falling into place because you start designing your life around the responsibility that you take. So, I guess if I had to say the number one value... of Better Man, it would be to take responsibility for your life. And to not just sit back and wait for life to happen to you, but to go out and to say 'This is what I want in life and I'm going to make it happen. It's going to be up to me.'"
Being productive, building habits, and changing your behaviors are wonderful tools for becoming better people, but those changes are possible if you don't take responsibility for yourself and your actions.
"The rest of the things that we speak about, productivity, world power, habits, behavior change, none of that is possible without you saying 'I'm showing up today. I'm getting out of bed and I'm going to kick some ass.' So I would guess that would be number one for me, the number one principle."
People are always trying to jump ahead in the process, but the only way to build something sustainable is by doing it step by step.
"People want to shortcut the process. The effort that it takes to get there. The grind, and the hustle, and the pain, and the days and weeks of feeling like you're not getting anywhere... you want to shortcut it, and I completely get it, but ultimately there's only one way to really get anywhere. And that's brick by brick, step by step. That's the only way you can build something significantly."
We are constantly bombarded with lists telling us what to do. "Here are five hacks for this" or "Ten ways to do that" but these lists are rarely helpful. They rehash the same tired information.
Erik believes these lists are extremely unhelpful. There's nothing tangible you can actually implement from them.
"One of the things that quite irritates me the most is the five life hacks that will make you successful... and then you go and read these articles and it's the same stuff that's been rehashed over and over and over, and they give you this one thing and they give you one supplemental thing to fill it up, and it just means nothing. There's nothing you can grab onto and that you're going to implement in your life and it's going to take you further."
There's so much information out there that it becomes hard to distinguish what's useful and what's not. That's why Erik likes to distill his ideas for his audience. He knows they're busy. He knows they wants something that works. So he does all the heavy lifting for them.
"I think that's one of the big problems we have at the moment is that there's so much out there in the world. You literally have millions of sites at your fingertips, and if you're just getting started in self-development, it can be so overwhelming to go and search and sift through all these blogs and to find good quality content. And then you think you've found something, and the next thing you read completely contradicts it. So, what do you believe? And what I'm trying to do is say to people 'I've already put in the effort and the time to make sure this is good information that I'm giving to you, and I've put my filter over it. My Better Man filter over it... and this is what I've come up with."
Another thing Erik realized is we aren't going to be the right fit for everyone. We need to concentrate our efforts on people who will get the most out of what we have to say.
"At some point you just have to realize that no matter what you create, it's never going to be for everyone. And the quicker you can get to that point, the quicker you can start serving the people that you will do an excellent job of serving."
So stop trying to create for everyone. Stop worrying about your unsubscribes. And focus on your loyal audience instead.
"I think what happened for me is I just realized there's so many other things I need to focus on instead of my unsubscribes. I need to focus on people who remained and who said I want more of what you have. Like, why not put your energy and effort into those people?"