When I run a survey of my subscribers, they very often complain to me about a lack of FOCUS.

“That moment when you realize this llama has more focus than you do.”

They have a lot of knowledge, but they are not sure what to do, or in what order to do it in order to get the most success out of their online businesses.

I think that this can mostly be attributed to information overload. There are a lot of reasons why it’s so easy to get caught up in buying course after course, hoping to get some hidden piece of information that’s really going to skyrocket our businesses. But the fact is, these reasons that we give ourselves, if we actually objectively look at them, those reasons are not strong enough to be worth the investment. Not just of our money, but of the time that it takes to implement them.

First of all, there’s a mentality of shopping when we go in our inbox to learn more about marketing, to have offers forwarded to us. We can very easily adopt the mentality of a spoil shopper who walks into a mall and waves his finger around and looks for things to purchase. But that consumer mindset is not exactly the best way to approach a business. After all, about ten percent of people in internet marketing are actual marketers. They create things that have value, and sell them if people are interested in them. Another ninety percent of people are customers. They’re interested in learning about marketing. They’re interested in reading about marketing. It’s true that they believe that they are interested in making money, but if you look at their actions, their hobby is still dipping their toe into the water.

Chances are if you are reading this blog, you are a little bit more serious than that.

Another reason is we are looking for a GOLDEN piece of information.

The problem is very few books and courses can give you an actual complete system because any business, especially the online business model, has a lot of complexities. And the problem is, you are never entirely sure which complexity you need to learn until you have taken the effort to build a complete business.

If you applied to a lot of courses in a piecemeal way, you’ll find that you have part of the business. You have a website that is in progress, you have an auto responder sequence that is finished, but you don’t have a steady flow of traffic that’s going into your system and your sales funnel. Think about it. In an offline business, if your business was in the middle of nowhere and you had no foot traffic there because you were in the middle of a desert, you won’t have a business. You will have a building that has stuff in it. And there are too many people who have a website with stuff in it. Unfortunately, that is not a business. And one course can’t coach you on everything that is necessary to make any system work. You would have to be incredibly deep and comprehensive, and that would usually be too complicated for the average person to apply.

It’s very rare that we understand and take the heart of the idea that we need to keep things sample.

Another reason that so many people would rather buy e-books than actually work on their business is shortsightedness, laziness.

When we see something that promises results in thirty days, our imaginations run wild and we start to picture ourselves and our business at the end of thirty days with the great results that have been promised to us by this book or this course.

And very rarely do we think that we’re on the right track already, that what we really need is to push distraction to the side, work through whatever problems we are having with a fresh set of eyes and a fresh determination, in order to achieve whatever goals we have for our business. It’s very hard to think that way.

We have lack of confidence in what we’re doing. If you haven’t succeeded before, success is hard to understand. It’s hard to imagine, it’s hard to picture. If you don’t know what this process to success is, it’s easy to guess or to think that you’re being lied to about what it really takes to build a lasting business. If you’ve ever bought a book or a course that promised a complete system, only to have it fail to work, and then to see something similar that promised another different piece, it’s easy to take resentment from that previous book, apply it to the new one, and think that that’s going to give you the actual answer.

Maybe you feel lied to. That’s why there are so many sales letters that try to build empathy with you by talking about other courses that have failed. They profiled you as a serial sampler of marketing courses, and they’re trying to exploit that feeling and raise your hope that the next thing you buy will be the one that works.

But I think the one that works needs to be YOU.

It’s also brutally easy to rationalize the things that lead us towards information overload. A good example of that is the idea that we’re just trying to build a basic knowledge. You know, it might be easier to flush out the knowledge that you have, to get rid of it because a clean mind is a more effective mind. The fact is, how many of the books that you purchased have you actually read, implemented, and used to their full advantage. Chances are there hasn’t been very many. In fact, chances are that if you were to reuse and reread the books that you’ve bought in the past, they still have value. You just got bored with them, or decided that they wouldn’t work for whatever reason.

In the long term, though, it’s going to be better if you push through your own personal roadblocks and supply the solutions yourself.