Musings of a Non-Completionist 2: The Hustle
Kill Your Inner Loser | January 17, 2020 | by Andy
-------------------------
_This is a follow-up to Musings of a Non-Completionist
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/musings-of-a-non-completionist/] –
read that first._

So, I’ve got a mission. Something I want more than anything I’ve
ever wanted before. A _dream_, if I want to be all posh about it.
It’s a lofty goal: I WANT TO QUIT MY JOB AND WRITE + COACH FULL
TIME.

When I first started this site, I told my girlfriend, _“You know
what would be cool? IMAGINE IF I MADE $1 FROM MY SITE, SOMEHOW. I
don’t even know if that’s possible. But wouldn’t that be the
most mind-blowing thing ever? Imagine if someone actually paid me for
my advice. Seems impossible right now.”_

The idea of someone paying me money – _in essence saying my advice
was worthwhile enough they wanted to give me something in return for
it_ – seemed outlandish to me. Sure, I knew plenty of other guys who
charged money for their advice, but that was just it – those were
_other_ guys. Other guys who weren’t me. Sure, they could do it; but
I wasn’t sure I could.

I’m no stranger to self-doubt and _imposter syndrome_. Both have
been running themes [https://killyourinnerloser.com/doubt/] in my life
during most of my big goals & the hurdles I’ve overcome, like a
script constantly running in the background in my head. I never in a
billion years thought I deserved to get laid a lot
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/proof]. I never thought I deserved to
get out of 10 years of abusive relationships
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/my-transformation/]and actually be
loved by someone in a healthy, respectful manner. I never thought I
deserved to be strong, or lose fat, or look good, or be respected, or
make friends. I especially never thought I deserved to have women –
and people in general – actually _like_ me.

I overcame all of that, despite my doubts, insecurities and complete
conviction there was _no possible way_ I could ever have any of the
things I really wanted. But even as I achieved the goals I’d laid
out, there was always one I never believed I’d ever achieve: TO HAVE
MONEY.

I don’t know why, I can’t tell you where it comes from, but I have
_always_ had a firmly-held belief that no matter what, I will always
be poor. Like a self-fulfilling prophecy
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/you-get-what-you-subconsciously-believe/]
I’ve willed into existence, I’ve racked up about $20,000 of debts
over my 32 years on this earth – even when I had enough money
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/how-i-lost-28000/] I could have paid
that all off instantly. I’ve had chances to earn good money, but
I’ve squandered them, because I never believed I deserved to be
anything but poor. I had a _loser’s mindset_, and thus I’ve
remained a loser when it comes to money.

But late last year, SOMETHING CHANGED. Like a light switch flicking on
in my brain, I woke up one day with a realisation: _I deserve to be
financially-independent, as much as anyone else. _I don’t know what
brought on this change; maybe a combination of hitting my loftiest
goals with girls like having 3somes & exploring BDSM, and realising if
I could hit my goals with women I could probably do it with money.
Maybe a bunch of guys on the GoodLookingLoser forums
[https://goodlookingloser.com/forums] pushing me to start charging for
my advice and set up my coaching page [/coaching/]. Maybe one of my
best mates _BadIdeaBear_ starting his own business & pushing past his
own doubts and insecurities, and eventually starting to flourish.

Or maybe it was two of my best mates getting massive payrises at work
– one in particular got himself a 40% raise just by asking for it.
And this was a guy who’d gone most of his life feeling like a
financial-loser, and not at all believing he was entitled to earn
decent money. He found out he was being _massively_ underpaid compared
to everyone else in his office, took a chance and asked for a raise,
and they said yes in an heartbeat because he’s a bloody good
contractor.

Whatever it was, something changed late last year and I realised I
want to _make it_ as well. I don’t like looking at my bank account
and seeing -$20,000 show up on the screen. I don’t like keeping
myself up at night, wondering how I’m going to pay the rent. I
don’t like sometimes having panic attacks when my workplace goes
quiet and I don’t have a job for a few weeks. I don’t like having
to turn down all my friends offers’ to go travelling because I
can’t afford it. I don’t like not being able to pay for _Boosts_
on Tinder and get laid more, or fix my shitty fashion, or improve my
balding hairline. I hate feeling worthless, being embarrassed by my
financial situation – being a financial loser. I HATE HAVING NO
MONEY.

I dont want this to come across as me feeling sorry for myself. I
absolutely put myself in this position, by believing I didn’t
deserve to be rich. That _limiting-belief_ has haunted me for years
– a decade – and it’s my fault that I never faced it before now.
I guess I was scared.

It doesn’t matter; the past is in the past. I’m ready to face my
fears now; _I want money_. I want financial independence. I want to be
able to afford the things I need to continue my self-improvement
progress. I’ve hit a wall in my journey that only money can bust
through. I don’t even want to be rich, necessarily – I just
don’t want to be _fucking poor._

And it’s not just money I want; actually, that’s only part of it.
I WANT TIME. I want time to write, I want time to actually help other
guys, I want time to be able to dedicate myself to my coaching. I want
to be able to sit on a coaching call and fully dedicate myself to
helping the other person, without the selfish background worries of,
“If this guy stops seeing me, that’ll make it harder to pay the
bills.” _I need to finish putting on my own oxygen mask so I can
better help others put on theirs._

I want free time during the day, instead of going to my warehouse job
for 8 hours a day (plus another 3hrs total commute time), wasting 11
hours a day I could be spending writing. It’s _painful_ being
somewhere you don’t want to be, desperate to escape – like being
in prison. I feel trapped, and during my worst moments, _hopeless_. I
want to write, I want to express myself, I want to fly free of the 9-5
grind (6-5 in my case) and have the freedom to fill my days however I
choose. We all deserve to be free of our shackles, and god knows I
want this more than I’ve ever wanted _anything_.

I realise I could get another job. At this point that’s a waste of
time and resources – this job is thankfully very flexible. I get to
go to work whenever I want and leave whenever I want, which means I
can skip work when I have last-minute coaching calls and keep on
hustling with my site. There’s not much point going through the
time-wasting disruption of switching jobs when I’m working hardcore
on becomingaa full-time writer/coach. I need to just shut up, accept
that things aren’t ideal right now, and hustle like crazy.

So I do exactly that; I SHUT MY MOUTH AND I HUSTLE. I fill in every
spare second I possibly can with writing & building up this site. I
write on the train and the bus to work, I write on my phone whenever
nobody’s watching me at work. I write during my tea break, during my
lunch break, and again on the commute home. I write in the shower
[/musings-of-a-non-completionist/], when I’m out to dinner, when
I’m with my friends. Hell, I wrote most of this article during my
commutes to and from work. I fill my weekends with nothing but
writing, staying up til 4 in the morning then falling asleep on my
couch and waking up at 8am to write some more.

I hustle with my coaching too; I’ve offered half-price discounts on
my coaching multiple times, I’ve paid past clients and friends for
referring new clients to me and I’ve done everything I possibly can
to make sure my clients get the most out of our sessions so they’ll
want to see me again. I constantly bug everyone to refer me to other
people; I’ve gotten 8 one-off coaching sessions this week, just by
asking.

I hustle with monetising my blog in a _hopefully-not-annoying _way;
I’ve set up a second site [https://kyil-extra.com] I plan on using
for affiliate links & guides on using the stuff I’m passionate about
(sex toys, books that have changed my life, dick pumps, cool shit,
etc) to help support myself.

And I’m getting there. I NEED 7 REGULAR WEEKLY CLIENTS in order to
pay the bills; RIGHT NOW I HAVE 3 (as well as a few sporadic one-off
clients if I hustle and advertise my services).

My biggest struggle has always been _patience_; as one of my clients,
several of my friends, & my own mother always say, “Andy, you always
do everything in extremes.” I find it hard to take a deep breath and
tell myself to wait for what I want; I’m like a darn millennial,
wanting instant results. (This is the part where you say _Ok boomer._
Also, this reference won’t age well.)

I’m an all-or-nothing kind of guy; I like to go all-in. I overcame
my approach anxiety by doing “social anxiety drills
[https://www.goodlookingloser.com/anxiety/program-index/approach-anxiety-program-week-1-1]”
– some days on 100+ girls. I banged 3 girls in 10 hours
[https://www.goodlookingloser.com/forums/lay-reports/139680-andy-bangs-3-new-girls-in-10-hours?start=1500#320628].
I took MT-II to tan quickly
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/tinder-guide/#212-additional-things-skin-care-height-increasing-shoes-posture-shaving-your-body-tanning-cologne-etc].
As much as I promote slow and steady progress, one day at a time
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/progress/], sometimes you need to do
the opposite and become fucking _obsessed _for a few months while your
crush your goals.

That leads to tension and stress though; being obsessed with something
means it’s hard to sleep, hard to take a break, hard to turn off and
relax. Every second spent relaxing feels like time you “should” be
working on your goal, and it leads to a situation where, ironically,
relaxing just makes you more stressed. When relaxing doesn’t help,
talking it out usually does – so I’m writing this post to release
some of the tension and stress I’ve been feeling over the last few
months.

This tension has been slow-building, creeping in so I didn’t really
notice it, like a frog slowly boiling in water (irrelevan sidenote:
that saying may be a myth
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boiling_frog#Experiments_and_analysis]).
I struggle to relax at all during the day now, and I can barely sleep.
I lay my head down on the pillow and I’m filled with an urge to go
back out to my computer and write some more, hustle some more, do
_anything_ to push myself further with my goals. I get a surge of
adrenaline and I can’t sleep; last night I was up til 3am, totally
restless, my thoughts racing a million miles and hour.

It’s also frustrating because I know the words on this site are not
even remotely my best work, because these aren’t the best writing
conditions. And whilst I’m always banging on about giving yourself
permission to suck
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/give-yourself-permission-to-suck/],
there’s still a lot of tension that comes with knowing you’re
handicapping yourself by working a full time job whilst trying to
building up a website/community.

Even writing – the thing that brings me incredible joy – is a
source of stress and anxiety at times. Thank god not _all_ the time
(99% of the time writing feels fucking _amazing). _But every now and
then, I’ll be reminded that I only have a limited amount of time in
the day, and I keep having the thought, “Is this the most productive
article I could be writing? Should I stop writing this and write a
different article? _How on Earth will I ever get through the
literally-hundreds of articles ideas I want to write about?”_

MY BRAIN IS A CACOPHONY OF NEW IDEAS I so desperately want to share
with you, because a lot of it is stuff that has been genuinely life
changing for me. I have so much to say about getting laid, about
having 3somes, about building honest and open communication with
girls, about taking psychedelics and LSD as self-improvement tools
(I’ve tripped 30-40 times), about getting a girl to bring you more
girls, about dealing with depression and suicide, about motivation and
building habits and pulling yourself out of crises. I hate the notion
that guys are constantly telling me their struggles, and I have the
answers to their problems but it’s all locked away deep inside my
head. I have a _responsibility _to get it all out, I owe it to the
guys who are struggling – because when I was struggling, plenty of
people helped me. But I don’t yet have enough time in the day to
write everything down, and that’s incredibly frustrating – and
oftentimes, disheartening.

-------------------------

When I take a step back, I have to admit none of this sounds very
healthy or rational, does it? If I’m honest it’s rather
_pathological_; I’ve gotten myself into a situation where everything
is a source of anxiety, I’m constantly frustrated, and my fight or
flight instinct is continually activated. So caught am I with filling
every spare second with writing, I can’t help but see relaxation
time as “lazy”.

Thing is, I’ve seen the opposite; I’ve seen what it’s like to
relax. I had 2 weeks off work over Christmas, and I was able to just
chill out and do whatever I wanted. I went on roadtrips, I spent time
with my friends, I watched YouTube for hours a day. I wrote – _oh
how I wrote_ – and it was the stuff I really wanted to write. I
didn’t feel like I was in a constant frantic rush to cram as much
writing into what little fragments of free time I had. I could just
sit down and write from 8 in the morning until 3am the next morning if
I wanted to – and yes, I did that for quite a few days in a row. It
was fucking _marvelous_.

Contrast that with when I’m working full time. When I have a limited
amount of time in the day to write, I “can’t” finish my
articles. When your only writing time consists of 5 minutes here, 10
minutes there, you have to stop-start-stop-start your writing, which
aside from being disruptive can soon start to feel like you’re
making absolutely no progress whatsoever.

Instead of being able to sit down for 10 hours and just finish
something all in one go, you have to work on it over the course of a
week or two, constantly being interrupted hundreds of times, each time
feeling like you’re stopping right when you were on a roll. “I was
right in the middle of having a huge epiphany I just _had _to write
down, and now I have to stop before I’ve finished! Ahh! What if I
forget the idea? What if it was the best idea I’d ever have, and now
it’s gone?” It’s like stopping right in the middle of sex. Blue
balls.

_Blue fucking balls_.

So I have to cram, cram, _cram _to get my ideas down on paper, which
means I’m racing against the clock. I’m literally always checking
the clock – I need to make sure I don’t miss my bus stop, or miss
my train, or be late for work, or get caught secretly writing in the
toilet for too long, or be seen writing at my desk at work when I
should be working, or take too long on my lunch break because I’m
obsessed with writing.
[Post image]
None of this is meant as a pity party. I’M WRITING THIS ARTICLE
PARTLY TO SHOW YOU I’M HUMAN, FALLIBLE, FULL OF INSECURITIES & GOING
THROUGH MY OWN STRUGGLES. None of us are perfect. Fuck being perfect
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/alpha/]. Being perfect is not even
remotely important; I achieved all my past goals by being completely
fucking imperfect. Hell, most of the time I’m a complete
train-wreck, and yet that hasn’t really mattered. There’s only one
thing that leads to success: _just never quit._

Don’t take any of this as me complaining, even though perhaps it
seems like I’m crying, “Woe is me!” Truth is I LOVE MY LIFE, I
love where I’m at right now; even if it’s currently filled with
lots of self-induced anxiety and stress & unrelenting pressure. I DID
THAT TO MYSELF. I’ve got tools to cope with it; CBT, deep breathing,
soft music, telling myself, “Chill the fuck out, bro. Everything
will work out.” All of which helps.

This article itself is me relieving the tension, using a tool to help
myself be ok. This keyboard – and expressing these words – do
wonders to keep me from feeling overwhelmed.

And I’m also writing this article as a pep-talk to myself; a “you
can do it!” motivational speech to remind myself I’m doing
alright, I’m making progress
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/talking-with-girls-isnt-making-progress/],
and I’ll get there eventually –_ I just have to persevere_.

-------------------------

I spoke to my girlfriend about all of this, and among other things,
she pointed out:

_“Aw honey, I don’t know how you want to approach things, but do
you think your deadline of by the end of the year having your coaching
established is making things worse, like increasing that urgency and
anxiety about always having to write? I know you want to get to a
point where you’re able to be financially independent and not need
other work, but it sounds like the urgency to make that happen is
hurting you.”_

She’s right in many ways, and I’m grateful to her for pointing it
out. She was the impetus for me writing this article. I know I’d be
a lot happier if I chilled out and relaxed, and told myself, “If it
takes me a year or two to be able to quit my job, that’s fine. I can
wait.”

But even as I type those words out, _I know I don’t believe them for
a second._ I can’t fathom the thought of sitting around _waiting_
like a good little boy – WAITING FEELS LIKE A PRISON SENTENCE. I am
deeply unhappy with my current financial circumstances. I’ve been
unhappy about it for my entire adult life. I’m unhappy with not
having reached this goal when I’m already into my 30’s; I could
have addressed this so much sooner. Much like I used my deep
unhappiness as motivation to transform my sex life
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/my-transformation/] with urgency and
extremity, I urgently want to build my financial independence. No,
“want” isn’t the right word; I _need_ this.

In this case at least, waiting feels like giving up. Like giving in. I
know if I tell myself it’s OK to wait a year, I won’t really try
as hard to become financially-independent. I’ll be admitting I
don’t really want it, instead choosing to rest on my laurels. I
won’t hustle, I won’t have that _desperation and drive_ to make
this happen. I WON’T BE ALL-IN.

So I’m focusing on the hustle, filling every spare second I have
with writing & building up my site. I’m doing my best to produce the
absolute best content I possibly can, just trusting _If I build it,
they will come._

I know I’ll get to the point where writing/coaching pays the bills,
and then all of this will _really _snowball. I just have to get myself
over the threshold, the critical mass, the point where I have much
more free time I can dedicate to really building up my work & creating
something truly worth visiting. At that point I’ll be able to write
multiple articles a week – one a day is my goal. I have thousands of
ideas in my head just waiting to burst out and come alive. It’s
_painful_ not being able to express them, and I long for the day I can
throw myself into this with 100% gusto.

I HAVE TO JUST TRUST THAT IF I FOCUS ON WRITING THE BEST & MOST
HELPFUL CONTENT I POSSIBLY CAN, I’LL EVENTUALLY MAKE IT.

I’m grateful though, even though this may all seem a little
ungracious. At the top of this article I said I started out feeling
like it would be a massive achievement to make a single dollar from my
work. Fast forward to the present and I’ve made _a couple thousand
percent more_ than that initial, seemingly-impossible goal of 1 measly
dollar. It’s been the most rewarding work I could possibly imagine,
and I can’t believe people are paying me for it.

The word “work” does it a disservice; what I get to do feels like
the most rewarding thing I could possibly imagine. I get to give guys
the same motivation and support other guys so graciously gave me,
finally feeling like I’m _paying it back_. I get to root for the
underdog; I’ve seen so many guys come from absolutely _nothing_ and
really get their shit together, going from virgins to guys who
regularly get laid. I’ve seen weaklings become monsters in the gym,
I’ve seen shy, timid guys become confident men – I’ve been
blessed by people sharing their stories and their struggles and their
victories with me. I can’t imagine doing anything else right now.

No, this is not work. This feels like a _calling_, and I’m so bloody
grateful people actually pay me for doing the thing I want to be doing
the most.

I’ll reach my goal one day. SUCCESS IS LITERALLY INEVITABLE IF YOU
JUST NEVER QUIT. I remind myself of that daily, and I keep on
hustling.

And if you’re up for some coaching – that’s here [/coaching].

Update: I wrote a companion piece to this: Musings of a
Non-Completionist 3: Why I Write for this Site.
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/why-i-write-for-this-site/]

-------------------------
[Yo, Andy here. I’m an Aussie guy who went from a depressed,
suicidal loser to a guy who gets laid regularly, has 3somes & BDSM
sex, crushes weights at the gym & loves his life. I killed my inner
loser. It's my mission to get you to kill your inner loser too.]
[https://killyourinnerloser.com/my-transformation/] 

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Archived from https://theredarchive.com/blog/Kill-Your-Inner-Loser/musings-of-a-non-completionist-2-the-hustle.34279