Finding the shortcut is harder than going the long way.

People want to find these shortcuts, and I’m not hating on shortcuts and expounding how “hard work beats shortcuts” or some hollow inspirational one-liner. Tell that to someone that’s worked their ass off for 40 years and gotten no where that they want to be.

Hard work doesn’t always work.

So work smart then? No, not quite. I’m saying that actual, true shortcut is actually not the perceived shortcut. I’m talking about the situation when people say, “Here’s how I got made $1 million dollars WITHOUT…”, followed by “college degree”, “having tech skills”, “knowing how to code”, “having any money and good credit.”

I’m saying it’s easier to get a college degree, learning how to code, and work a 2nd job to get some extra money. You know why ‘make money’ programs don’t say, “Here’s how I made it big, but you need $20k in the bank, good credit, a solid understanding of tech and coding, and a good degree.” Because it starts to seem obvious that making money is much easier at that point. If it’s truly so easy to get rich once you have those things, then make your goal to have those attributes (a degree, 20k in the bank, decent credit) and not the near impossible “1 million dollars!” generic meaningless goal. Consider that it may take 5 years to learn the shortcut techniques to succeed without any skills / money / credit, but it only takes 4 years to do it the “hard way.” How hard are we working to avoid working hard?

The true shortcut is the hard way.