de podcast episode #011 breakups and startups -...

Practical resources alongside inspiration for anyone dreaming of a life and livelihood in an exotic location at hughwhalan.com/podcasts

DE Podcast Episode #011 Breakups and startups - how dating advice can

help you set up shop With Mark Manson

Show notes at: http://www.hughwhalan.com/DE11

Presenter: Welcome to the Destination Entrepreneurs’ podcast, where we share the stories of everyday people who ditched their 9-5 life to set up profitable businesses in exotic locations around the globe. Now, here’s your host, Hugh Whalan.

Hugh: Today we’re talking to Mark Manson who writes for his own blog

markmanson.net, on entrepreneurship, dating, lifestyle advice, and a whole range of other interesting topics. What I’m really excited to talk to Mark about today is the intersection of entrepreneurship, dating advice, and fear. Fear, in particular, rules a lot of our lives and a lot of the ways we make decisions, and we often make the wrong decision because we fear a negative outcome. And I think that is particularly true of destination entrepreneurship. You’re moving to a different country, you’re trying a very different thing, you may feel like you’re throwing away your old life to start a new one. And that can be really scary. So our conversation with Mark starts when we are talking about fear, dating, and how to conquer it all.

Mark: I graduated from university in 2007, and within probably six or eight

months it was clear that the 9-5 thing was not going to happen for me. It was just not a good fit. So I started looking at alternatives, and I really got into the whole internet marketing gig, all the Frank Kern seminars and Ed Dale stuff, and working on copywriting, bought all of Dan Kennedy’s books. I really wanted to have a go at getting some sort of passive income, read 4 hour work week, so I was like, okay, I need to get passive income so I can go travel and live in all these different places. And I fell in for a variety of reasons,


I fell into the men’s dating advice market, partly because I had been a customer of the men’s dating advice market for two years.

Hugh: Jees, tell us about that. Mark: I had a horrible breakup when I was in college, I was like 22 and I’d

never really dated before so I had no idea what I was doing. So I did what every nerdy 21st century guy does, I got on Google and started asking Google what I should do. I ended up with all these sites and downloading these books. Some of it was helpful, some of it was really not helpful. A lot of it was kind of sleazy and manipulative, and I realized after a couple of years that I wanted to get better with women but I don’t want to be a scumbag, so there’s got to be some sort of market opportunity here for improving with women without being the scumbag. That was my first project, I got involved with some of the people in that market and then ended up starting my own business. And from there I started building some things, I did some freelancing work for a while, I went through this phase a lot of entrepreneurs go through, which is having all sorts of hats and trying all sorts of different things, because I wasn’t really sure where my competitive advantage was or where the real opportunity for me was.

I did that for a couple of years, and after a few years the dating

advice stuff started doing pretty well and it actually turned out, to my surprise, that I was a really good blogger.

Hugh: What does that mean, being a good blogger? Mark: It can mean a lot of things. What I noticed was that people really

identified with my voice and my writing, and it came very naturally to me. So I started meeting other people, other internet marketers, and they were complaining about how it was such a pain in the ass to come up with content for blogs all the time. And for me it was always very easy. They were complaining that their open rates were really poor, while my open rates were like astronomically high. I realized, without ever having studied or tried it, that I had a knack


for it, I had a talent for it. So that became my focus starting three or four years ago.

Hugh: I am really curious about what you’ve seen, coaching men how to

date better, and also being an entrepreneur yourself, about the nexus between dating and entrepreneurship, because there is a lot of fear in both of those subjects.

Mark: Sure. There is actually a really intriguing overlap between our

dating lives and our business lives, particularly with entrepreneurship, or you can compare it to a ton of things like salesmanship. I think the big thing it comes down to is that you need to be willing to accept that your failures are actually helping you to become good at it. So in the case of dating generally the people who do the worst in their dating lives are the people who have these absurd expectations, like every woman needs to be attracted to them, or every date needs to go perfectly, of if she doesn’t call me back it means I’m a loser. These are unrealistic and unhelpful ways to look at things. As a result it sabotages their dating lives. I think you can draw a direct correlation with the entrepreneurship world, I think that the people who struggle the most starting businesses are people who have unrealistic expectations. They think that they’re just going to come up with the perfect idea and then they’re going to make a million dollars, and that’s it. They don’t realize that every successful idea has gone through sometimes dozens and dozens of failures, and dozens of iterations, and you have to try things constantly that don’t make money, or that you embarrass yourself, or make sales calls where people hang up on you. That’s part of the process, and it’s the people who are able to get comfortable with that part of the process who generally end up coming out ahead in the end.

Hugh: Can you get comfortable with it? I’ve been there, I’ve had

expectations that my next business will make a million dollars in a month, and it’s an utter failure. I failed way more than I succeeded. How do you end up conquering that fear of failure to get through the first couple of failures so you can start seeing success?


Mark: I think what needs to happen is you need to take a step back and

see the bigger picture. I think people who get fixated on failure see it like an all or nothing thing, it’s like the end of the game. Whereas actually it’s just one score or one point. I think people need to step back and realize that your failures are generally your best lessons. They’re the most educational moments, and every time you fail at something or do something boneheaded it’s is an opportunity to learn from that and to get closer to what’s actually going to make you successful.

Hugh: You give dating advice and you offer dating coaching through your

website, is that right? Mark: Yes. Hugh: To special individuals. You sound like a busy man but it sounds like

you do projects on a one by one. Mark: Not to bore everybody with the technicalities, I was a dating coach

up until two years ago. I still do consultations for people through my website, but it is not specifically for dating. You can call it life coaching, dating, business, career, life choices, stuff like that.

Hugh: When somebody comes to you, and I bet a lot of the people who

come to you have a similar style of problem, and let’s take a dating example, they come to you, they’re not finding the right people at the bar or in their life, and they’re looking for answers, is there typically a first step that you put everyone through? What’s the process to get them out there to start doing stuff and start exposing themselves to the potential for failure?

Mark: The biggest hurdles in the beginning are the one people

manufacture for themselves. Usually what I do with people first is if they have a big goal, whether they have a business idea and they want to start it, or they want to meet a girlfriend and don’t know where to go or who to talk to, what I try to do is— The fact is we


usually crate these expectations for ourselves that we have to go through this big, monumental, life-changing thing that’s going to be really difficult, and really epic in proportion, like you see in the movies of whatever. In real life it doesn’t work like that. It’s really a summation of a ton of small actions that add up over a long period of time. Usually what I do is I try to get people to start with one of those small actions. If you can get people to start with something small, I’ve found that that generally generates the motivation to continue on their own. To use a specific example in the situation of dating, sometimes I will get people who want a boyfriend or girlfriend really bad and don’t know what to do, and they’re frustrated because they’ll never meet anybody, so I’ll start with something simple, I’ll say, okay, go find a class or an event that interests you and just go to it, don’t even worry about talking to people, don’t even worry about meeting anybody, just show up and try to have a good time. Once you do that, once you’ve gotten out of the house and actually gone and done something, then we’ll worry about meeting somebody or talking to people or flirting with people or asking for a phone number or whatever. But let’s start with just getting out of the house. Again, it can be easily applied to business. People ask me all the time how do I make a blog like yours, and I say it’s a six-year process, it’s not like here do this. So what I tell people is start writing now. Go home today and write 2,000 words for no reason other than that you enjoy writing those 2,000 words. And then go sign up on BlogSpot or whatever and put them up. Start there and then worry about the branding and the marketing and promotion and the SEO, and so on.

Hugh: Cool. How do they come up with that first thing? Is there a list you

get them to do, or is it literally just doing something, something at all, and that gets them through the process and they start taking the steps they need to take.

Mark: I usually try to focus on what is the simplest action that is

necessary. If you think of dating, the simplest action that’s necessary is you have to get out of the house, you have to go be social somewhere. So you might as well start with that, it’s an easy


goal, you can accomplish it, it’s pretty clear when you’re successful at it and when you’re not. Generally just accomplishing that will provide inspiration. I have clients all the time who are like, hey, I signed up for that event and I just went like you told me to, and I met this person and I’ve got a date Saturday night, and I didn’t totally plan on doing that. I think it’s just break things down into the smallest necessary components and start now. People get this idea and say, oh well, I’ve got this job and I’ve to pay off my debt, and so I am going to start business eight months from now. No, you can start things now. If you want to start a marketing business you can start writing marketing material now. You can start reading books now, you can start making connection and contacts and the like. You don’t have to do everything all at once in the future. You can start building all these things slowly over a long period of time.

Hugh: You help people achieve their dreams, you help them get girlfriends

and boyfriends, you help them start businesses, you help them figure out what they want to do with their lives. You’ve recently written a bunch of stuff that’s pretty interesting about how sometimes wanting something can be better than having it. Can you explain what this means? I guess the bigger picture for me is sometimes following your dream actually results in a bad outcome for you.

Mark: I don’t know if it necessarily results in a bad outcome, but I know it

can result in unpleasant outcomes, or unexpected outcomes. The simplest way to describe this – and I have a few articles on this – is when we fantasize, when we dream about things, we don’t dream about the negative aspect of things. If you’re dreaming about opening up your own restaurant in Cancun or something, what you dream about is having the place next to the beach, drinking margaritas while you watch the sunset, having all these cool, fun people come to you your restaurant and hang out, you think about all the benefits, you don’t think about the cost, you don’t think about the bureaucratic issues, getting the licensing, dealing with foreign legal issues, dealing with the crime, you don’t think about all the tedious day-to-day stuff that is absolutely necessary for


accomplishing that. You just don’t think about it when you’re sitting in traffic, driving home, thinking how amazing your life would be. I think what happens to people a lot, and I think this is why you get people in a lot of situations where they have these fantasies for themselves year after year after year, they’re like I want to start my own business, or I want to become a graphic designer, or I want to quit my job and go live in a different country, or whatever, they keep fantasizing about these things because they want the benefit but they don’t want the costs that go into it. They don’t want to have to deal with budgeting their time and coming up with the ideas and submitting business proposals and all the boring stuff that nobody likes to do. They’re not willing to do the sacrifice. So I think what happens in a lot of situations is that people’s dreams have less to do with what they want to do, it just has to do with what they’re not happy with in their life right now. So I think there’s a lot of people out there who have these dreams about being an entrepreneur or living in all these places around the world, but really it just comes down to the fact that they are not happy with their job. Because they’re not happy with their job, the fantasies feel very very good to them to think about. But when it comes to actually doing it, they’re not willing to put in the effort, put in the sacrifice.

Hugh: So how do you validate your dream, how do you make sure that it’s

achievable? Mark: This actually ties back into the last thing we talked about. This is

what is so great about ‘start with the bare minimum’ component. I can’ tell you how many people over the years have e-mailed me, wanting to talk to me about how to start a successful blog, and my answer to them always is write three articles a week for the next three months and then come back and I’ll talk to you about whatever you want. And nobody comes back. It’s maybe one out of fifty that comes back. It’s because they actually sit down and they start writing, and they’re like, oh, writing articles is really hard, I just got a negative comment, I really don’t like that. Or they come home from work and they’re tired and they’re like I don’t really want to write tonight. And after a few weeks they realize I don’t actually


really want this. I think I just like the idea, I think I just want to work online, I don’t think I actually want a blog, I don’t like writing. So that’s the other benefit of taking these bite size chunks of your dream and trying them out now, because then you get the actual taste, you actually get to see that this is what goes into it, this is why it’s hard, this is why not a ton of people are doing this right now. And then you can make a more realistic decision from there. And sometimes people do try it, they’re like I do like this, this is absolutely what I want to do. But a lot of times people are like that’s not quite it, I think it’s something else, I want to write but I don’t want to be a blogger, or whatever.

Hugh: You’ve written about the cost of happiness, and this sounds pretty

much like what you’re talking about, to get where you want to be involves sacrifices and hard work, and it’s not a cakewalk.

Mark: Sure. I think our culture is getting a little bit – I don’t want to say

deluded, that’s a very strong word – but I think in our mass marketing, social media culture, the last couple of generations have really been sold the idea that happiness is some simple thing, like if you have the right job you’ll be happy, or if you marry the right person then you’re just going to be happy. But everything that’s worthwhile in life requires a consistent and steady struggle. The best marriages require the ability to struggle with one another, grow with one another, deal with conflict, deal with each other’s needs. The best businesses require the ability to deal with problems effectively over and over, the ability to try ideas and fail over and over. I think there is an inherent negative side of life that people avoid. When we avoid it, we sabotage ourselves, we end up not accomplishing anything we want to accomplish, or we end up not feelings how we want to feel. I think what needs to happen is being wiling to face that negative side of life head-on. You’re like, I am going to fail, but that’s okay, because I want to have a successful business. Or, you know I am going to get rejected, but that’s okay, because I want to have a great girlfriend. Once you accept that it just makes life so much better.


Hugh There is a cost to your dreams. The stuff I write about, the people I talk to, they’re moving overseas, they’re leaving their life behind, they’re moving to a country sometimes where they don’t speak their language, they’re setting up businesses when they typically have very little or no business experience, and there are plenty of challenges on the road to happiness. That’s for sure.

Mark, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for your time. Anyone listening, markmanson.net wants to talk to you.

Mark: Yes, absolutely. Hugh: All right Mark, thank you so much. All right guys, that was good fun. Mark Manson from

markmanson.net – don’t go to markmanson.com – he’s got lots of good stuff about a variety of topics on his website, so check it out. And as usually you’ll find links and resources about things we talked about in this podcast on my website www.hughwhalan.com/de11. Until next time.

Presenter: Thank you for listening to the Destination Entrepreneur podcast at

www.hughwhalan.com/podcasts. Don’t forget to check out www.hughwhalan.com/blog for all the latest tips and advice on setting up shop in an exotic location.

de podcast episode #011 breakups and startups -...

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