Your Business Model Sculpts Your Character

As I come upon 15 years of blogging – Oct 1st is the anniversary of when I started – I’ve been thinking about how the actions I’ve taken and the business models I’ve explored over the years have sculpted my character and personality.I feel especially grateful that I didn’t over-invest in some early income streams. In my first few years, most of my income came from advertising revenue. Now none of it does. I shut down that particular source of income in 2008 because it didn’t feel aligned, even though it was off to a good start at the time ($12-13K per month).People thought I was crazy to drop that easy passive income stream, but I don’t regret the decision. It was the right move, and I did it for intelligent reasons. If I had continued to rely upon advertising as my main source of income, it would have sculpted my future character in a direction I didn’t want to go.If I kept generating income from ads, then my true customers would be the advertisers and ad networks. And while that model worked on a practical level and many people still use it, I didn’t like what it meant for my future path of growth as a human being. It meant that my business systems were set up to sculpt me into becoming a better ad guy. I was already seeing that play out as I spent time tweaking and improving the ad layouts on my site back then.And I questioned the wisdom of that path:Do I really want to go this route? How do I honestly feel about it?Do I want my business to sculpt me in...
Source: Steve Pavlina's Personal Development Blog - Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tags: Values Source Type: blogs