The Ultimate Reason People Fail to Make Money Online

Nicholas Linskey
Mind Feed Hub
Published in
5 min readAug 23, 2021

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Photo by Travis Essinger on Unsplash

Many people these days are trying to make money online. You probably saw a lot of advertisements showing in front of your screen.

You probably saw a smart-looking guy telling his successful journey through making money online, and this way seems to be legit for you.

So, you want to give it a try.

You follow every step that guy told you, but the cash still hasn’t flowed into your pocket.

Next, you decided you are being scammed by the guy and wanted to change another way to make money online. The reason you cannot achieve your goals is that you forget about a key thing.

“Failure”

We all read about successful and motivational stories that inspired us to have a dream and work harder, hoping that we could be one of the stories that people are talking about in the future. You heard of Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk …

These big names come into your ear repeatedly.

They are not only rich but successful as well. And we tend to assume — if we follow the same road behind them, we will become the next billionaire. While that’s not how it works — because these are typical examples of survivorship bias.

What is survivorship bias?

Survivorship bias is a common scenario when everyone is only able to see how the success shines, but forget or even never see the glance of failure before.

This scenario often occurs around us because people tend to see and bother about the success story. Everyone is eager to know the “secret recipe” of being successful like those big bosses.

Ever people want to make money online and become rich. So, instead of seeking how failure occurs, people tend to search for successful case studies.

Can you still remember “Why do you want to join the team” to make money online?

Well, maybe you saw the amount of the “gurus” who show their PayPal money keep on increasing. Secondly, you may watch articles about people making money online passively and remotely without doing many jobs.

You heard the news about successful people making millions of money and become rich overnight.

So, you decided to follow in their footsteps too.

What leads you to join this?

It’s all because you want to be successful. You want to be wealthy, living your life without financial worries. Do whatever you want. It’s financial freedom. Earn passive income.

So, what have you been doing?

You pay a lot of your time. Learning the skills that you need, or you put a lot of your money into the advertisement, hoping that will help you to generate the leads.

Have you achieved your goals yet?

But the reality is, all those things are so far away, they seem like a dream that you can touch, it is hard for you to dream come true. You may be still struggling to earn or money, or maybe, you haven’t earned your first sales yet. Why?

Survivorship bias

You can see 1% of the success story in front of the big screen, or on the cover of the magazine. You could see lots and lots of people sharing their motivational quotes.

But at the same time, there are 99% of people who are doing the same thing at that moment, but they failed — you haven’t heard of them because they are not included in the historical market.

Most entrepreneurs — not all I would say — don’t know what they are doing until they are a success. Time is flowing in a straight way, which means the second you see now is not the same as the others.

There is no step-by-step guide in the journey to becoming a successful entrepreneur.

Risks, accidents, unknown… Everything is going to happen along the road, just like when you are driving a car, you may meet uncertain traffic jam, or need to do something emergency.

“Life is full of unknowns, and it is hard to predict it”

Every people will want to the “secret recipe” behind the successful people and try to emulate every single footstep. But the truth is, the “secret recipe” will only succeed at that moment of opportunity, plus the luck that is in their hands.

People tend to like a story packed with a sugary coat and will believe what they have talked about — they are so close to us, and it seems like everyone could do that too.

Every vision can turn into imaginary. Sounds awesome right?

The most real-time example of survivorship bias is skipping college. Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, two of the famous billionaires who did not complete their degrees and left college.

They have become a successful entrepreneur without having any degree’s qualification and seem like proofing to the world that getting a degree is not doing anything special.

With this survivorship bias scenario, people notice a pattern — successful entrepreneurs drop out of school or college and start up early.

We must remember, there are thousands of people who drop out their college but still do not achieve any success in their life.

“A stupid decision that works out well becomes a brilliant decision in hindsight.” Daniel Kahneman

Could you avoid stepping into this scenario?

Well, I would say it is hard to avoid because people will naturally spend their time listening to successful stories.

Many people want to make money online fast, and want to see the results within months, or even overnight.

Building a side hustle to earn passive income is a good habit to practice — as people become easier to lose their jobs these days, you probably need to have multiple income streams to tackle this problem.

But you need to know the real meaning of passive income before getting started to build your mindset:

A lot of people are having misconceptions about passive income, thinking that they could earn money fast with this method and be financially free for the rest of their life.

Passive income is like the wheel spinning at a bicycle. You need to put in the effort for it to spin at the beginning, so after that, the wheel will have the ability to spin by itself for some time.

The key difference between passive income and active income is the amount of effort that you need to put in.

Passive income needs a small amount of effort but will then generate a huge amount of income for you. While for active income, comes in based on your ability, and most of the time it is fixed.

However, after a while, the wheel will begin to slow down, and you need to put in some energy and effort into the wheel again to make it continuously spinning. You don’t want the wheel to stop!

Passive income is not an income to make money fast and easy. You still need to spend time and pay your effort for it to generate the amount that you want.

Conclusion

Every success comes after failure. If you are suffering hard to make money online and don’t know how to continue your journey, it’s absolutely normal.

This is a path that every entrepreneur walks through before they achieve their goals in life. Preparing yourself and getting ready with the mindset that everything will not be that smooth at the very beginning are good practices for a long-term run.

*Originated from The Ultimate Reason People Fail to Make Money Online*

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