Everywhere you look, there seems to be shortcuts. The quickest way to lose weight, the fastest route to Bob’s Burgers, how to make money with this 3 step automated system, and so on.

It doesn’t matter who you are…everybody wants a shortcut.

They’re supposed to save you time, money, lose more weight, make more money, but the reality is that shortcuts tend to be fairytales, things that marketers convey to us to get us to buy XYZ product, or something we create in our own minds and dwell on.

Back in 2005 when I was starting online, I got sucked into several different areas, mostly eBay and network marketing.

In fact, my Grandma invested several grand into an eBay marketing course which she of course never did anything with and thought maybe I could learn a thing or two and “make thousands of dollars per day”. Truth be told, I was 15 or 16 at the time.

While different from the other kids, didn’t necessarily have the work ethic at the time. I didn’t do the small work, the building blocks, the basics.

The goal was to make a lot of money, but I wasn’t focused on doing the small work which is the day to day grind, to get to that point. And we see that same thing in social media. So many individuals and businesses wanting to build a large, active, engaging following/fanbase, yet they’re not willing to put in the small work. The hustle.

You simply can’t expect an end goal without making the proper commitments and actions to get there. No one ever said this stuff was easy. Okay, some have, but that’s BS. In order to get value, you must first give and put in value. Social media is no different from any other platform.