Best Practices Will Kill Your Business if You Don’t Put Yourself First

Lessons learned from wasting my dream business by blindly following advice.

🤩 Hey! I’m Alberto. With my newsletter I want to help you reach your full potential and live your ideal life with a content-based business.
I talk about productivity, automation, strategy and mindset.

I launched my first website in October 2010. In 2011 (or 2012), it was already earning me my country’s average salary.

I was teaching photography through articles and guides. I was working from home. People recognized me on the street and thanked me for my tutorials. The dream job!

But I squandered it.

That website could have become a seven-figure money-making machine. Instead, I gradually lost interest and eventually sold it.

I’m ashamed of this story. But I reflecte on it to avoid repeting my mistakes.

I found one surprising critical error: excessive trust in best practices.

A dream born from the ashes of a broken dream

At 24, I had a dream for my life (which looked like a plan): to become a researcher and university teacher. So, I joined a Ph.D. program in computer science. The reality of the daily work hit me like an ice bucket sweeping away my dream and leaving me shivering.

So, I started searching for an alternative and found a book that changed my life: The 4-hour Workweek. This is not a hyperbole. It actually changed my life.

I knew no entrepreneurs. An independent career wasn’t even an option. Tim Ferriss’s book inspired me with the endless leverage made possible by online businesses.

The collapse of my dream taught me a crucial lesson about myself: I can’t stand working under someone else. Entrepreneurship seemed my natural path.

Look mom, I’m a professional blogger!

I explored many possible online business models. The best match for me was professional blogging.

I have always had a talent for teaching. Professional blogging means teaching through your articles and products at scale. It perfectly fits an absolute introvert like me.

I was passionate about photography, so I launched a photography blog. I wrote two articles per week, and they soon began to dominate Google.

Meanwhile, I filled my head with online business best practices. I didn’t just study, I imlemented.

And it worked:

• my website reached 300000 pageviews per month from Google,

• my mailing list grew to thousands of subscribers,

• a mix of affiliate products, Adsense, and my own products added up to a full-time income.

Ready to take off?

The web is filled with similar success stories. Now you would expect me telling about 7-figure revenue, seaside villas, and dream vacations. For a moment, that was my vision too—but things didn’t go that way.

I knew the 4-hour work week was just an ideal. I was working closer to 40 hours per week. But I liked it.

However, all the experts told me, “You shouldn’t work in your business; you should work on your business”. I felt stupid spending all that time writing articles, creating guides, making videos, and answering emails, even though I felt this was my calling.

Unfortunately, school, family and society taught me there is always someone else who knows better: he’s more experienced, knows the right answer, and knows the rules of the game. I must shut up, listen and obey.

And I did obey.

Misdirected

I began implementing what I had learned about outsourcing. I spent months identifying tasks to delegate, looking for the right collaborators, negotiating prices, assigning test jobs, selecting people, discovering they weren’t as good as they seemed, and starting over.

But two pieces were missing, and I ignored them:

• I didn’t have enough cash flow to fund good outsourcing,

• I didn’t want to manage people. At all.

“Ah!” you could argue, “The problem wasn’t the best practice, it was the execution”. You may be right.

But the common advice was also to start as soon as possible, even if it felt uncomfortable. Outsourcing frees up time for high-leverage tasks only the entrepreneur can do. It’s worth it paying an assistant $20 per hour if you can produce a $50 value with that hour.

The problem is that best practices often lack context. Every expert speaks from their point of view, maybe from the point of view of a few clients. They have no idea how different situations can be. They surely don’t know your situtation, unless they advise you 1:1.

Damn self-doubt!

I knew self-doubt constantly sabotaged me. I recognized its voice daily. It was so predictable that I turned it into background noise and devised my workarounds.

For example, it pushed me to over-edit my articles. So, I committed to a tight publication schedule, leaving no space for perfectionist delays.

I hadn’t yet realized self-doubt ran deeper, though. It pulled the strings from the darkness. It nurtured an inferiority complex towards all experts. I believed anyone knew better than me. I couldn’t listen to my own feelings and inclinations.

Self-doubt thrives on impatience

After a few years of constant growth, traffic and sales stalled. It’s inevitable. Despite what business influencers say, it can’t always be up and to the right.

This scared me and urged me to do something different, namely outsourcing. Rationalizing this move was easy: “I have to free up my time to strategize and create products”.

But in hindsight, there were lower-hanging fruits. I could have just improved or invested more into what worked:

• publishing more YouTube videos, maybe broadening the topics,

• reviewing and republishing old posts,

• searching for new high-potential keywords,

• starting an Instagram account,

• doing more launches for existing and new products.

The hard-earned lesson

I should have had the courage to embrace my calling (i.e., teaching) and make it my Northern star. There are always multiple ways to make an online business work. If it’s not fun, why bother? There are plenty of regular jobs for that.

So, I have a new rule:

1. getting to know myself, to understand what fulfills me,

2. keep learning tactics and strategies,

3. find the compromise between my inclinations and what “should” work best.

The first step is an endless process. And no one can tell you when you’re right about yourself. But there are many simple techiques that helped me develop self-awareness: journaling, reflection, meditation, conversations with thoughtful people, accountability buddies, coaches, actively consuming content.

The hard part is consistency. We must work on our awareness every day, noticing, reflecting, and adjusting based on the outcomes of our actions.

I hope this article helps you avoid my mistakes.

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