There’s a famous play called “Waiting for Godot” where two men wait for a guy named Godot to show up. While they’re waiting, they eat, sleep, converse, sing, play games, exercise, swap hats and argue.
Anything to avoid facing the fear that Godot might never show up.
Somewhere in their conversation they sort of admit to each other that neither of them really knows the guy and they might not even recognize him when he shows up.
A friend mentioned this play and I thought of a bunch of people sitting behind their computers, starting their online businesses, waiting for Mr. Success to show up.
Everybody’s trumpeting their secret formula… you know, the one that’s going to make Success magically appear.
When you reach it, you’ll no longer think of it as “achieving the Success formula” or “cracking the secret code.” You might see it like I do: a game of being sensible and balancing between extremes:
1. Persistence to a Fault vs. Failure To Persist:
Gary Halbert used to say, “Fail fast.” Find out as quickly as possible of something isn’t going to or can’t work.
This is a scary one because if you put something to the test ASAP you might figure out the idea you’ve been dreaming of for 2 years is impossible. Don’t put it off. Find out fast if it’s going to sell. Do that before you’ve built all kinds of systems and structures.
If it doesn’t work, drop it and move on.
Other people finish the first 10% of a dozen great ideas. Obviously that’s no recipe for success. Carry ONE thing across the finish line.
2.Getting enough help vs. getting too much:
One of the smartest things I ever did in college was hire grad students to help me whenever I got stuck.
BUT: I didn’t figure this out until my senior year. I would just sit there for hours and grind away at these problems. I cringe when I think of how many all-nighters I pulled, sitting there trying to figure out something all by myself.
I thought paying a grad student $10 or $20 per hour to walk me through it was too much. WRONG. Once I figured this out, I stopped grinding my way through “hard” classes because they just weren’t that hard anymore.
No matter what you’re going through, what puzzle you’re trying to solve, CHANCES ARE 99 TO 1 THAT SOMEONE ELSE HAS SOLVED IT. Find ’em, pay them their fee, and get on your way.
Yes, there’s nine gajillion pages of free content on the Internet. But if you know someone knows how to solve your problem, then pay them the money and have them solve it for you. If you know they can teach you, then write the check and ask them to show you.
Sure, you can lurk for the rest of your life and attempt to reverse-engineer what other people are doing, but if there’s a paid shortcut, take it.
The other extreme is: Thinking that giving people money will bring you the answers. Becoming a card-carrying member of Seminar-holics Anonymous won’t get you there either. It’s about finding those with answers, paying them their fee, and applying what they teach you.
3. ADHD vs. Too Much Focus:
The first thing you must do is get good at ONE day of getting traffic and ONE way of converting it. All kinds of people wait for Godot for years, cuz they’re trying to get good at six kinds of traffic. That’s not how it’s gonna happen. Master ONE thing.
But you can take this too far, too. A few years ago I had a student who had a grand-slam runaway success with an ebook. It was a non-financial topic – something family related actually – and with one product and just Google AdWords was making a comfortable six figure income.
Very impressive. But try as I might, I couldn’t instill him with enough healthy paranoia to keep expanding outward. Eventually the competition came knocking.
Having one product and one source of traffic is a great START for a business. But it’ll be a short lived business if you don’t spread your risk around.
4. Ideal business vs. real business:
Sometimes the “ideal” business only exists in your imagination.
Sometimes as a way of avoiding reality, people plunge themselves into businesses that in actuality don’t work or barely exist at all.
Example: “I’m going to be a life coach.”
That business exists more in the imagination of life coaches than it does in reality.
REAL “life coaches”, to stick with that term, are usually people who have real life expertise on some very specific topic and have used it as a doorway for a relationship based on the fact that they have wisdom in a lot of areas.
Ideals are great, but don’t let them kill real-world success.
Don’t be afraid to get your hands dirty with some very ordinary, regular business. Never think of the web as an alternate universe or some kind of escapism. Some of the best marketers and consultants I know are people who developed their chops taking the family business online or helping some manufacturing company or just solving some problem that presented itself.
5. Distractionitis vs. Not Enough Guidance:
Some people are on 37 different email lists and are forever chasing the latest, newest thing. Other folks doubt that anybody out there can really teach ’em anything and they don’t listen to anyone.
Both approaches are fatal. YES there are people who can teach you all kinds of things you need to know. But also know, you can only pay reasonable attention to 2 or 3 of them, not 37.
In the play, the characters admitted they didn’t really know Godot. They weren’t sure they’d recognize him when they did see him.
The hucksters exploit that. Case in point: Turn on an infomercial that promises instant Internet riches and there’s a certain look and feel to everything. It’s the Hollywood version of business success.
That version of success doesn’t exist.
(Though I admit, it does sell!)
There are, however, people who have successful businesses. They don’t talk quite so loudly. You can watch them and learn from them and little by little you pick up the clues.
You leave Hollywood behind and when the real Godot shows up, you recognize him immediately.
Perry Marshall
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About the Author
Perry Marshall has launched two revolutions in sales and marketing. In Pay-Per-Click advertising, he pioneered best practices and wrote the world's best selling book on Google advertising. And he's driven the 80/20 Principle deeper than any other author, creating a new movement in business.
He is referenced across the Internet and by Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, INC and Forbes Magazine.
16 Comments on “Waiting for Godot”
Hi Perry,
Just discovered you… interesting article and enough to make me want to read more.
Incredible insight Perry. Speaking of being on 37 different lists. I took your advice from earlier and wiped out my mailbox clean. You’re one of a few people who I look forward to opening my email box everyday. Although I must admit I’m probably not the best market for your product right now – as much as I would love to be your round table student – I just can’t afford it at the moment. One day…
Great post Perry.
I am finding with persistence that success arrives in bits and pieces. It starts with your first couple of sales, then a while later you might see a couple of $100 days. Later still you see $1000 show up in your bank account.
It is a process and at some point you recognize that you are making money through the internet and success (Godot) has arrived without you noticing.
I do aggree about finishing one project before starting another but don’t put your eggs in one basket. The internet shifts too fast and no matter what niche you are in there is someone trying to get into your space. Diversification is important.
Thanks again Perry.
Hi Perry,
The Godot analogy is good but not as good as your ‘First Let Your Business Glider take off before adding The Powerful Scalable Engine for sustained flight’.
After grinding through several systems in the past, I finally discovered a way to let my IM business glide and I am right now in the process of adding the engine to it.
Perry, you would be doing your readers a disservice if you don’t write a story around the ‘Glider’ analogy. I think it will be a source of inspiration for many upcoming iMarketers. Hey! You could follow it up with your story on ‘If your business isn’t selling, your missing an info-bit to complete the business puzzle’.
Kishore Dharmarajan
Hi Perry,
What you have said is so true. The choices you make must fit the purpose.You can’t go into a shoe shop and buy a dozen pair of shoes of various types. When the pair that you want for the purpose you want it for, is the one you should have bought. they will take you where you want to go to comfortably – – leave the hiking shoes for another day.
Seriously Perry, great post. You are a master educator, writer, and story teller. I’m subscribed to 20 mailing lists, but only to keep up with the latest in email marketing strategies :).
Remember guys, if you want to make a lot of money online, make a digital product that solves a problem a lot of people have, and market and sell the heck out of it.
Wow!
This one hit home. Right to the heart.
Thanks Perry, I needed that.
Hmmm,
An interesting choice of subject for your analogy Perry.
Considering that I found Waiting for Godot to be the most boring piece of theater I’ve ever had the misfortune to witness, I began reading this article wondering if
1. Success, aka Godot, is destined never to arrive;
2. the wait for success will be long, boring, tedious and futile;
3. It’s the process of waiting for Godot, or attempting to achieve success, that is more important than the arrival itself. But then, if the process of attempting is itself long, boring, tedious and futile…..
I hate Waiting for Godot.
Nice article though.
I am going to say that this is one of the very informative blog post that I have read this year.
I learned a lot from the post and will definitely put what I have learnt into practise
Perry Marshall, Glenn Livingston, Terry Dean, Dan Kennedy. 4.
When I play on-line, there are a couple more that are considered ‘insiders’ I inter act with on other forums; But those 4 I learn from.
~Mark
Perry,
It’s solid advice like this that keeps you on my list of 3-4 people to listen to in the web marketing industry.
Keep it coming.
Perry,
I so look forward to your ‘pearls of wisdom’This is my favorite and Ohhhhhhhh, so true!
Oh so true… and yet simple as well. It’s taken me quite a long time to figure out most of the above by myself – especially # 2.
Who knew all one had to do was ask? Getting help (the *right* kind of help) is now a part of my philosophy. God only know how much time I’ve wasted trying to figure out everything by myself.
And the thing about learning from 37 different people – LOL! That was me. Now, Perry is one of the few marketers whose emails I actually read.
Great stuff!
Hey Perry,
I must admit, I wsa Mr. Godot, but them days are gone. “Persistence to a Fault vs. Failure To Persist” One thing seems to elude me “Giving up”
I can’t, I put all of this effort into a site, and I feel I can make it successful, How do you know when to quit? I built this site because I have experience in this business, passion. It’s a content site and I want to give the customers the information their searching for. even though the competition is fierce.
Cheers,
Jim
Perry,
There are two people that I implicitly trust in this industry: You, and Sean D’Souza.
Why? You give specific ways to take care of things, one bite at a time. You may not give away the whole meal (and why should you?), but you do give out “samples”. The samples are great, and implementing those can bring specific benefits and greater revenue.
The get-rich-quick crowd is not based in reality, so the vision they cast, and the methods they promote are broad, and non-specific. They sell the menu, and then tell you what your meal will taste like when it is done. You can’t implement anything, so you will never know whether they are telling the truth, unless you buy their product.
The hilarious thing is that they catch their target market of people who think that everything should “just happen” without any work. These people will convert over and over again.
As to #2, I would say that it holds true 99% of the time, if we are speaking in terms of opportunity cost. However, I would say that persistence in learning some skill sets(the brute force plowing) helps with problem solving in other areas.
As you are the expert in the field, I’ll kill my comments here.
This is one of your best blogs yet. My favorite two paragraphs are below. You’re on point with this for sure…
“No matter what you’re going through, what puzzle you’re trying to solve, CHANCES ARE 99 TO 1 THAT SOMEONE ELSE HAS SOLVED IT. Find ’em, pay them their fee, and get on your way.
Yes, there’s nine gajillion pages of free content on the Internet. But if you know someone knows how to solve your problem, then pay them the money and have them solve it for you. If you know they can teach you, then write the check and ask them to show you.”