This reflection is not one of those that one finds on Facebook saying how happy and grateful they are with life, thanks to friends who never fail and such things.
And it is not one of those LinkedIn sites where they seek to present themselves as the most professional and to take the brightest medals and greatest achievements off the shelves.
No, this is a list of things I learned this year that may be useful to you too. If I don't write them down for that reason, I'd rather make a "dear diary" and leave them to myself.
There are 7 tips.
This is a long post, so please allow 5 minutes to read.
Maybe it's the last one of the year. Anything goes.
What did I learn in 2023 and how can it help you?
You have to believe in yourself more.
First, you have to believe in yourself more. I talked about that in last week's Marmogram.
How did I learn it? Well, as it usually happens, by realizing that if I had done what I do now before, I would have saved myself a lot of stupid turns. Sometimes it is others who make you doubt, and sometimes it is almost always you yourself who do not believe you are capable.
I spent all of 2021 and 2022 (yes, 2 very long years) trying out ways to generate passive income.
I learned about dropshipping (which is crap in Colombia), I learned about advertising, I learned about SEO and Google Ads, I learned about Affiliate Marketing… and all of that to end up doing something that I wanted to do for many years and that I always had in front of me:
Helping people to enhance and exploit their skills. Improving their personal brands.
I'm not saying that passive income isn't a good method, but it does require a lot of time and dedication to start generating some return, and I couldn't afford that. I needed to generate income quickly. That rent doesn't pay for itself.
I'll go into more detail about dropshipping another day, but to sum it up, I sold 64 million pesos (more than 16 thousand USD) in one month, but I didn't make any profits, instead I lost 3 million. So NEXT.
Anyway, if I had believed in myself more two years ago, it would be a different story right now.
I'm sure it's happened to you at some point in your life, especially if your name is Ivan. The blessed Impostor Syndrome attacks all the time. I even think it was the topic I talked about the most in my podcast.
Now I not only generate more income but I also work happily in s vietnam email address omething that I enjoy infinitely.
I love to write.
You have to lose the fear of selling.
Now that I sell so much (and it all started when I decided to be more direct in selling my services) I think about why the hell are we afraid of offering services and selling ourselves.
I think it has a lot to do with not believing in ourselves, but also because in our countries money is demonized a lot. It's as if it were wrong to earn money or charge for what we know. As if someone who has a lot of money is either a drug dealer or a prepaid drug dealer.
If you don't tell people about the service you offer, how are you going to sell it? It's simple: if you don't show it, you don't sell it.
Now, I'm not just talking about monetary transactions. Ideas, projects, and our skills can also be sold.
We should all know how to sell. Better yet, we should all know how to sell ourselves.
Convince someone of the benefits of what we are offering, of the campaign, of the song, of the business idea, of our services.
But no, at school they teach us to play the flute and that the Amazon is the largest river. At university I even studied quantum physics, which to date has only helped me understand the jokes in The Big Bang Theory.
Few skills are as useful in life as learning to sell. Learn to sell!