Hi, I’m Lewis and I’m addicted to the internet.
There, I said it! I’m an internet addict!
I’ve known this for a long time. I love the internet and everything about it. For the past 90 days, I’ve probably had 1 day where I haven’t opened my laptop and gone online for at least 5 minutes. I’m hooked dammit!
Here’s why:
My auntie used to own an internet cafe back in the 90’s, before internet cafes were cool. Every day after school, I would buy a bunch of penny sweets and a 10p panda pop (remember those? Some hippy mummy fascists pretty much forced the manufacturer to kill the product not too long ago), sit in my aunties shop and open up this wonderful gateway to a world full of information and fun.
AOL was the internet back then
I’d open up AOL on the old Windows 98 desktop, click connect and sit through a minute of whirling and squeaking sounds from the computers modem.
But then I’d be online. Anything I wanted to know, see or do was possible – and that thought blew my mind as a child. Nearly a decade or so later, and my mind is still blown by this digital world that turns every person with an index finger and a telephone line into a superhuman of sorts. You can do, see, find out or become anything online. It’s the modern day version of the wild west, or the caveman era even, new discoveries (as a result of boundry pushing?) are the norm.
The same thing that makes the internet so amazing, is the same thing that makes it catastrophic to someone trying to build something using it as a platform
So you’re building a new internet business. The steps are (mostly) laid out, you’ve studied the greats who have travelled the path before you, you’ve carefully crafted your offer, established your target market and know exactly how you will get your product in front of the people who will buy it.
So you’re on a path to success…
After a long day of writing sales copy and making a few huge strides towards launching and/or growing your business, you hit up your favorite internet hangout spot to blow off some steam. Twitter, Reddit, Dynamite Circle or Hacker News. Work hard, play (read) hard, right?
Oooh, what’s this; a link on Twitter to an inc magazine article about software billionaires. A discussion about a cool music-focused ‘lifestyle business’ on HackerNews or a baller case study about someone crushing it in e-commerce on Dynamite Circle.
Change the examples to suit your situation, but this happens to me every day. And after reading these articles, discussions and case studies, the end result is usually a visit to namecheap.com and a domain name purchase for a new ‘inspired’ business idea that I have convinced myself is my ‘thing’.
I can spend up to a couple of months sometimes wasting mental energy and time on these new ideas, I’ll call them spin-offs, that distract me from my original project, that business in the feutus stages that needs at least 1-2 years of intense focus and energy from me in order to see any sort of success.
Bright, sparkly things & cutting it all out
The internet is this amazing resource that, if you let it, can provide more knowledge and noise then you could ever consume in one lifetime.
That’s why today, instead of posting the second edition of It’s A Wrap Saturdays where I link to several distractions that might lead to un-needed ‘spin-offs’ from building that valuable resource that you should focus on, I’m going to leave you with this verse from the philosophical rapper, Rakim, in the song Documentary of a Gangster:
He call the lab the bakery, he all about dough
Stuffing bread his pockets is hungry
You talking nonsense unless the topic is money
He call a hundred dollars a honey
Mami’s he called them dimes
So his mind is on his money
But Mami’s is on his mindLike an O.G. focus on the come up
Think he F’ing around he approach you with the gun upRoll the blunt up and forget it happened
Stash the dollars, bag the product and get it cracking
No bright sparkly things for me today, I’m off to go get it cracking…..
Right after I’ve checked Twitter 😉