The options are not just:
1. Work 40 hours a week for someone else until retirement.
2. Start a business, work alone until you can afford to leave your job, and hustle until you've saved enough for retirement. There’s nothing wrong with either option. The problem is, this is the equivalent of believing that chicken and steak are the only edible foods. And if you can't eat chicken and steak every day, for the rest of your life, there's something wrong with you.

Most people, even if they have an idea of what they want to do, don’t know specifically how they’ll do it. They don’t know how they’ll make enough money selling their art, how much to charge for their woodworking, or the specifics of the program they want to offer. It’s normal not to know that.

Cheap things don’t sell themselves. A lot of people make the mistake of believing that if they launch a cheaper course, workshop, or product – it will be really easy to sell. This is a myth.
Selling cheap things requires just as much energy as selling expensive things. Because for every product, offer, or course you sell – you have to learn how to sell that thing. It’ll be different from how you’ve sold other offers or products. Learning to sell isn’t hard.
But it does require energy and focus.

You’ve got to stop focusing on you. That’s what’s happening when you’re worried about coming off as too much, too salesy, too annoying, as a fraud. When you’re up to your eyeballs in despair because you’re convinced nothing is working and nobody wants to hear from you, you are focused on you. Your income. Your client list. Your revenue. Your reputation. Your future. What people think of you.

There are a lot of ways to be confused. Here are three of them. Way #1: Drowning person tries swimming harder: I don’t know what to do, I keep changing my mind, every time I think I know what I want to do I think of a reason I shouldn’t do that. I feel panicked. I talk to a lot of people about it, they all tell me something different. My pro/con lists are just confusing me more. I've read all the self-help books, they don't work or I'm even more confused.

When I was a kid, my mom used to tell me that I needed to know how to cook at least 3 dishes if I wanted to find a husband. When guests would come over, I was in charge of serving drinks and snacks to everyone as they waited because I needed to learn how to be a good hostess (so I could be a good wife). I was also supposed to learn about football because it would set me apart, my mom thought, in the marriage market.

Most people don’t have money saved to fund their brand new business idea. Most businesses require some start-up capital. The solution is not to wait until you have the money saved. If you wait, you'll have to weigh every financial decision against your dream for months or years. Do you fix your car or invest in your business? Send your kid to summer camp or invest in your business?

Maybe you're critical of capitalism. Maybe the thought of monetizing something that's meaningful to you feels gross, or maybe you just really hate the idea of ‘selling yourself.’ Or you're already exhausted because you've been hustling for too long and you don't have it in you to build a business.

Question: I’ve always thought you need to be on social media to market your business. I feel a lot of resistance whenever I go to write or make a video. Can I do this without social media? It’s so draining.