How To Cure Laziness And Accomplish More Than Ever

Looking for some answers on how to cure laziness? I’ve been feeling a little lazy recently and I don’t know why. Perhaps it’s because daylight savings makes everything dark and depressing by 5:30pm. That’s probably it. Over the past week, I’ve been waking up around 6:30am instead of my usual 6am to rock this world. Meanwhile, I find myself taking 30-45 minute naps after lunch or afternoon tennis. Shhh, don’t tell anybody.

As an entrepreneur now, nobody tells me what to do. Even though I’m used to working double-digit hour days, I can be as lazy as the best of them. My “work four hours a day, make $200,000 a year” challenge might be hurting my work ethic because I could be taking working four hours a day too literally. In order to work only four hours a day and make $200,000, I’ve first got to work much longer to set up the foundation!

When I posted in the Yakezie Forums, “How Long Do You Think You Can Maintain Traffic Without Posting?“, I wanted to get a discussion going on quality vs. quantity of posts to get the best return on effort. What I realized a couple days later is that I’m partly looking for shortcuts! I wanted to get some advice or some evidence from people who were able to bring their posting way down and still maintain a similar traffic level. Meanwhile, I’m too afraid to test out the theory on Financial Samurai because my posting queue is getting out of hand and I don’t want to risk my traffic going down!

CURE LAZINESS BY WORKING WHILE OTHERS ARE PLAYING

As we enter the winter holidays, it’s so easy to slack off, get fat, and do nothing. At work, this is precisely the wrong time to take it easy because the 4th quarter is when promotions and bonuses are determined. The holidays are also when managers determine who to fire! Now is the time to cure laziness and work your hardest. You need to be the most visible if you don’t want to be thrown onto the streets. If you do, of course you can read my book on how to profitably quit your job.

After realizing I wanted to take the easy route in blogging, I decided to challenge myself and others to write massive amounts of content instead. The challenge I threw out simply states to write at least 5,000 words of content a week from now until the end of the year. The 5,000 words can be written in various ways e.g. one 5,000 word post, five 1,000 word posts, three 1,500 word posts with one 500 word post, and so forth. To give you an idea of how much 5,000 words is, this post is 905 words long. Hence, I’d have to write at least six posts of this length a week!

I currently write about 4,000-4,500 words a week given all my articles on Financial Samurai are over 1,000 words long. Google loves meatier posts and my traffic has surged as a result. Whenever a disgruntled blogger tells me I’m so lucky to have such traffic, I ask him/her to join me in writing longer and more frequent posts. Each time I ask, I get no response! The answer is simply due to the laziness I feel right now. Instead of letting laziness sweep over me like a cream puff blanky, I plan to keep my schedule and write an additional 1,000 word post every week until the new year.

Every professional blogger knows that revenue is a function of traffic. The holidays are slower months for internet users overall, but that doesn’t have to be the case for individual sites. Every site’s potential readership base is in the millions a day, yet most of us only receive a microscopic fraction of that. The only way we can improve our traffic is to write more interesting posts that get picked up by larger media outlets, social media, and search engines.

FIGHT LAZINESS AND ACCOMPLISH MORE BY DOING A COMPLETE 180

The first step to cure laziness and accomplishing more than ever before is to recognize your faults. Once you realize you are being lazy, the second step is to punish yourself! Laziness leads to self-pity, which leads to blaming others for your problems. We can’t have any of that if you want to be successful in anything you do!

Let’s say you are supposed to work out three times a week for one hour each time, but a silly thing like work gets in the way of your health. You’ve got to now publicly challenge yourself to work out three times a week for two hours each time! Or, you can get a group together to workout five times a week for an hour each session. The same thing goes for studying a language, practicing an instrument, learning a sport, or building a business. You’ve got to make it to those 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert.

Make a challenge to work harder than you’ve ever worked before. Make it public so that if you fail, you are going to be completely embarrassed. Whatever you do in life, know that there is always going to be someone who is ready to take you out due to their motivation, hunger, tenacity, and perseverance to succeed.

There is so much wealth out there for the taking. Being lazy does not get you there!

STRIKE WHILE THE IRON IS HOT

If your blog is getting good traffic, I encourage you to find great products out there that fit with your content that you use as well. I’ve become an “authority affiliate” in Personal Capital and Motif Investing because I consult with them in their office every week. No other blogger has the same access.

* Personal Capital Review – A Sit Down With The CEO – This is my Personal Capital review post I wrote after sitting down with the CEO, COO, and VP of Marketing for two hours at their HQ. Because it is unique, it has done a great job in search. It’s thoroughly and insightful, unlike other review posts where the author doesn’t even use the product!

* Motif Investing Review: The ETF Killer? – Another meaty review post I wrote after sitting down with 50 Motif Investing employees in engineering, research, marketing, and the CEO. The review is extremely thorough, and I absolutely love their value proposition of letting individuals become their own fund managers for cheap.

* Prosper P2P Performance Review – Prosper is also based here in San Francisco, and I wrote about my returns after waiting two years to see how things panned out. Most other review posts just slap together something immediately.

All three review posts rank very highly in Google, and so they should. I am an authority affiliate who has actually spent hours sitting down with the very people who work at the companies I review. For Personal Capital, I’ve literally worked in their SF and Redwood City Offices for over 1,500 hours from Nov 2013 – Feb 2015. For Motif Investing, I’ve spent about 200 hours so for in their offices in San Mateo. And for Prosper, I’ve had multiple lunches with their marketing people in San Francisco.

Write great reviews and you’ll do great!

Updated for 2016 and beyond.