Morning Folks!
I wonder how many hours of my life I have devoted to lend a helping hand to anyone willing to extend theirs? Maybe measured in months. Maybe even years. I have watched throughout my life successful people feeling an obligation to give back. To pay it forward. I understand that desire to make a difference. To make a difference in someone's life. Somebody you don't know and likely will never meet. And if you do, all the better. I write my thoughts down and hope somebody will stop long enough to consider, evaluate and maybe even employ because they are timeless. To be honest, it was much more rewarding at one time. But now I am an "Old-Timer" as the "Wet behind the ears" crowd and those with little success to show are so easy to dismiss and give you the back of their hand instead of being a real man or a real woman and step up and step out. That's just called respect and character. You can't demand respect, you have to earn it.
If folks actually read, digested and considered what I have said about domains, business, life lessons, common sense, numbers, sales and GTLD's alone over the last 6 or more years, what I am about to say won't surprise you. What I have said about domains for 23+ years won't surprise you. What I have said about business and sales for the past 45 years won't surprise you.
If you actually read this entire post before you react, it may serve you well and you too may be surprised if you allow yourself. (not my choice, yours) In the Business World, there are no "Safe Spaces". There are just folks that want to EAT your lunch or have you PAY for their lunch. Do you know the difference? Old-Timers do! Every business changes constantly. It's a living organism. You need to adjust every single day. But you can't over adjust or over react or chase shiny objects for a living.
If you only read my words the way you want to and twist them to fit your narrative, then you will just be a wind-up toy doing the same thing with no purpose or result. It's an unrewarding pattern you might be a prisoner to. I have a key that you might find very valuable. I don't give a rat's ass either way, you are the one that might be held hostage by your own mind and lack of intellectual honesty. You won't allow yourself to examine and question your own stubborn thoughts. I also am stubborn, but I am stubborn the reverse way. I boil everything down to simplicity and the lowest common denominator. Call me simple. It works!! 1/2 or 50% is easier to understand than 1,325,172,624,492 /2,650,345,248,984. But I am confident some fool would like to debate that.
You have a choice with that key. You can unlock the shackles with the keys I provide free of charge and with my own time and dime or use it to gouge my eyes out. It's a human nature thing. It happens to everyone that dares to share. That's why they stop sharing.
I don't get to choose, YOU DO! And this post has nothing to do with GTLD's or Domains. It has to do with finding success in life and being able to repeat at will. That's the key.
Your life is either filled with unobtainable deadlines that cause calamity and failure or you are on cruise control and everything fits right into place. Once you find success you don't have to prove anything to anyone. But what level of success is really the question. Happy to make $25k when you could/should be making $125k. Making $125k when you should be making $250k? I believe we set our own ceilings. But don't aim for a Billion when you have yet to achieve a Million. You become a millionaire $1 at a time. Many building blocks on the way to your first million. Repeating it is easier not harder.
So please allow me to make my point. My entire point or has your pattern already taken over before I even begin? If you control your pattern you control your destiny. If the pattern controls you, you are nothing more than on the short end of the stick. That tiny little pattern is your master and maybe it is time to switch places with that little monster.
When I look at an issue I come at it from all sides and all angles asking many questions. Why? Because I am looking for an ANSWER not a predisposed CONCLUSION that fits whatever it is I want it to fit! My conclusion comes AFTER I find answers to questions. Many answers to many questions. Only idiots have a conclusion BEFOREHAND. Only idiots get angry when you ask a pertinent question or point out a flaw. The whole key of success is that your idea SURVIVE the barrage. If you don't have a valid answer then don't just make one up because you feel threatened or get defensive. That's a loser every time. You THINK about it and consider how to fix it. And if you can't fix it you have to give it some negative number as a factor. It's a leak. You don't ignore leaks on a boat. You either fix them or live with them. If you live with them you have to judge the size of that leak.
Now never confuse a conclusion with an assumption. On any subject, we either have "No idea whatsoever" or we have either a weak or strong assumption.
You can assume one direction is East and walk that way. But when the sun comes up, you will know if your assumption is correct or not. If not, you MUST adjust your PATTERN or you are forever lost. You may just want to argue with me for the sake of arguing. Argue with a fact like the sunrise and you are a fool. Sorry, but only a fool would get upset at that statement. Fools and idiots don't count. They are there to avoid and help show you what not to do in life.
In a moment, I will show you how a complete failure to find the right answer to East can be exactly the same as finding great success. If you do it right, you can still get it wrong and win. Depends if you IGNORE new information or USE it! Wrong is a much closer step close to right if you think logically and not emotionally. Failure is the seed of success if you use the info learned.
Success has a pattern. Failure has a pattern. Change your pattern and you will change your outcome. It's much simpler than any failure can imagine. But please don't let me get in the way if you need that failure.
The fools won't even read further. They stopped at the first stone they could cast. They will ignorantly react like they always do. It's a pattern. They are stuck until they can break the chains of that pattern. They are nothing more than a slave to it and don't know it. NOW ya do! Pass it on!
For those that are boiling and turning red, THAT'S your pattern! I am sorry you can't handle the truth. That's your pattern.
We ALL have our pattern. Patterns are predictable. Ask any FBI profiler. Ask any professional Poker Player. Ask a Trial Lawyer. Ask a Salesmen. These are all people and sectors that study patterns and human nature for a living. Facebook, Twitter and Google too! Habits and patterns. They are predictable.
It takes a lifetime to control and polish our own pattern. Deep thinking helps to eliminate the bad patterns or habits and replace them with good ones.
That is why I always say SUCCESS is easy to spot and FAILURE is even easier to spot. Once you hone in on somebody's pattern, you know where they will END UP before they do and do it before they even BEGIN! So, you have 2 groups in life. Those that train themselves about these patterns and ones that don't even know about it.
I root for your success. But recognizing OUR own failures is the path to great success. See you don't have to get it right. You can get it wrong and still get it 100% right. I can prove it right now if you let me.
When a person learns where East really is he/she can then figure out where West is. Where North is. Where South is. Where Northeast is. Where Southwest is and so on. From that ONE single answer, you get 100% of the info. Accurate info. It's a choice! You may not be able to control everything or be successful at everything but by understanding our own building blocks, we dramatically increase our chances.
Who cares that when the sun rose you were walking WEST or North, northeast or any other direction. Don't focus on that. All you needed to do was ADJUST and EMPLOY the new information. A SIMPLE ADJUSTMENT is the key to success. Ignore the info, and what do you have? What did you learn? Those that do that remain fools stuck in a pattern of failure. And if they do it for this simple example, they do it all the time. It's a pattern!
We ALL have the opportunity to shed the skin of failure and replace it with something that works. I was sad to see in a recent Namepros poll written about by TheDomains.com, that the vast majority of domains have made less than $25k TOTAL in their entire domaining careers!!! A whopping 72% of the nearly 500 respondents. Another 10.6% made $25k to $100k in their careers. So, they are not making a living either but they are finding some success and hopefully will build on that. That leaves only 17.4% that made more than $100k in their domaining careers.
If you have not found success, first look for EAST. The rest may just fall right into place. If domaining is your first business, it's going to be harder. You have many business lessons to learn. Don't ignore h=those lessons, embrace them!
But hey, why listen to an old-timer? You can keep believing the sun rises in the west and be wrong. It's your right to fail!
I won't get in your way. But I do feel bad for those folks because each time an opportunity is wasted or ignored, that means DESTINY passed them by! Another fish got away. Another day that somebody ate their lunch. Successful people know exactly what I am saying and they are the ones that read every word even though they know this stuff already. It's like spinach for some and poison for others. It's called reality. It does not matter what life throws at us, we dig deep and figure the best way forward.
Don't be a victim to an unsuccessful pattern. Take a deep breath and turn it around. It's really not painful at all and more rewarding than you might be able to imagine. Good Luck!
Have a GREAT Day!
Rick Schwartz
domainscot
totally agree with your post you have to change, adapt, some time little ajustment works wonders. even now we still make hard choice keeping or dropping domains that we have owned for long time. like you say when really look at them good % are shite. we started to just remove them from porfolio we had. Now more focused on that small group domains we own. sometimes you have to be hard with yourself and gie your self kick up backside to pust forward. Good to see your back posting again Rick.
Mark Thorpe
Great article, Old-Timer. j/k ;-)
I try to keep things simple as well, be realistic and use common sense, in everything that I do.
Domaining is hard work, don’t want to make it more complicated than it already is.
Andrei Dobrescu
inspiring. thanks. i see i need to make some changes
Sigma
“But hey, why listen to an old-timer? You can keep believing the sun rises in the west and be wrong. It’s your right to fail!” ~ Rick Schwartz
I am a Millennial and have found more domain speculation truth studying your blog than in any single location on the web. Before you went on hiatus from blogging, I mentioned to you that I was attempting to condense the ideas you mention to ’26 Laws’ that I keep handy as I navigate this industry. I’ll continue to add/subtract as you drop more domain game.
Also, let’s not forget the 80/20 rule Rick. The stone throwers you mention are the 20% doing 80% of the complaining/trolling. There are plenty of ‘new schoolers’ that sit back, take notes and appreciate your efforts; but the 80% are working in silence.
Bathe in their troll tears…
Nicco Schaal
While I have great respect for you and your lifetime achievements, I did not like that ‘sermon’ too much. It just went on and on about things ‘folks’ do right and or wrong. A man of your talents and success could have crafted a shorter and more meaningful message.
Brian Parker
Rick you are a wise and generous man who has contributed greatly to the domain industry. You have been an original domain pioneer and have achieved unparalleled success as a domainer and industry leader- deserving of the title “Domain King.” Some leaders in this field have taken their profits and disappeared, giving back little to advance the industry. You are one of the great ones who has invested yourself consistently to help grow the industry and have impacted thousands for the good. Whenever you take the time to share wisdom and insight to help the rest of us, you deserve our highest respect. You are the industry “gift that keeps on giving” and I’m certain I speak for most of us (if not all of us) when I say “Thank You” for sharing your thoughts.
Michael O'Neill
I enjoyed the post; hopefully you are back full/part time blogging.
My take-away from this is:
Success has a pattern. Failure has a pattern. Change your pattern and you will change your outcome and your future.
Failure is the seed of success if you use the info learned.
Recognizing OUR own failures is the path to great success.
I look forward to hearing more from you.
Michael
Edo Wierenga
Great advise as always. Keep posting!
Jose
The psychology of a pattern is ourselves and in life you can change the pattern because it may be of interest to one or the other.
We are many of us vulnerable, yes! You also in your time were one or more times and you recovered by studying and analyzing where you had been vulnerable, many of them, like myself, do what they taught me when I was studying Strategy and Advertising, also when reading Artificial Intelligence books, this helped me and put into practice to sell products and services from small to large local and multinational companies, I have my own methods to compete with the big brands and win in sales with a sale of 1000 pieces in stock in 12 hours and at 8 o’clock in the morning, to receive the consumer in packaged product while they are having breakfast, the surprise for them is of incredubility, never before this happened with the same Amazon, it was the beginning and I can be better.
Here I have a pattern that I always follow because I am faithful to my clients and to the consumers of my clients the companies or online business that know about me for another, not to advertise online for my services better is to have what I call a pattern that never change because to follow the same path that give me success.
With the years in the domain of US domains with the registrars domain domains many years with Moniker like me and domainer when first resorting to you without ever knowing you in person just for photography, I remember your help and your honest answer, soon! brief and direct, never before having happened ……….
Over the years learn much more from you pioneers and some of the fifth of 2007, I published in a post that in the world domain market have a 1% to take the best sales and 99% of domainers to live from this 1 % and in the end do not post this comment, tell the truth hurts I ask?
Before knowing by email my good Mentor, Morgan Linton, I had read a blog of a US man who bulk purchases of 100 domains (.com), and so on, put parking domainer to make money two months and reinvested each month in another 100 or 150 domains (.com) and sell domain names to the third, month to a Domainer that agree a purchase price, and earn money to get to the end of the month well and reinvest in more domains (com) at the end of each year the net benefit was higher and still had yield of 500 names of domains that have come to buy in the last two months and give an important economic revenue of parking domains, (I liked it and it was what I wanted to do, but the way twisted).
I have never reached a sale of 10K and see many domainers have Pigeon shit that have bought an expired for 150 USD and completed the 60 days are selling in BIN to 15K to tell the truth I have come to consider me a person who is losing the time when I have 15 domain names (.com) that you see and you would sell them for 250K to 1000K and I can not sell them or have 25K I am stupid, Yes! to continue in this market and to be caught by a large majority.
Happy day, Jose
Carlos Wuest
Applause!! thank you for coming back
Failure is the seed of success if you use the info learned.
Success has a pattern. Failure has a pattern. Change your pattern and you will change your outcome.
Aplausos !! gracias por volver
El fracaso es la semilla del éxito si usas la información aprendida.
El éxito tiene un patrón. El fracaso tiene un patrón. Cambie su patrón y cambiará su resultado.
Gary Appleby
Great read. Welcome back.
Merdock
The emperor has no clothes.
smartwebby
Thank you Rick for that very perceptive post as usual. The key thing many people forget is that there is always the opportunity to change what you are doing or ‘be the change’ and that takes research and analysis plus loads of hard work plus a very non-egoistic approach overall.