Make Money Online Lessons from Bruce Lee

My very first attempt to make money online began in 1995 when I started a website offering small business card type website pages to local businesses for $1/day.  The idea was to offer businesses an online web presence for just $1/day, and I would take care of everything – design the site, host it, etc.  Since it would only take me about 2-3hours tops to complete a single page website for a business, I figured if I could sell 100 of these type of websites I could make $100/day ($3,000/month).

It was an idea I got from a friend of mine (thanks Darcy!) and it was my first taste of “making money online”. 

The reason I mention it is because like many other ways of making money online today, it was a “system” – an idea of making money online in a certain way.  There are thousands of “systems” of making money online out there, each one presenting us with unique benefits and challenges.

I was reading through Bruce Lee’s “Tao of Jeet Kune Do” this evening when I came across this quote from the book:

“Stylists, instead of looking directly into the fact, cling to forms (theories) and go on entangling themselves further and further, finally putting themselves into an inextricable snare.”

By “stylists”, Bruce Lee is referring to the different types of martial art styles that have forms (Karate, Tae Kwon Do, Kung Fu etc.) and the “stylists” who cling onto these forms. 

Bruce Lee believed that the best martial arts “style” was “no style”, meaning he believed that a true martial artist must go beyond the forms of his own martial art to really achieve greatness.

Of course this wasn’t very well received by the martial arts community since the “forms” that they were teaching were the very things that students would line up to pay to learn. 

The challenge with forms, styles and techniques in martial arts is that they work great when applied to a situation with a certain set of rules, but completely break down when applied to “real life”.  It is this distinction between a sport based on rules and “real life” which has no rules that many people fail to make.

Bruce Lee wasn’t trying to teach people “self defense” as a sport.  He was trying to teach people “self defense” based on real life.  There is HUGE difference between the two.

Take the UFC as an example.  So many people out there watch the UFC and naively believe that it is a “realistic” combat art.  It may be more versatile and have less rules than something like boxing for example, but the UFC still has rules and the fighters that train to fight in the octagon train to fight according to those rules.

There is a big difference between defending yourself in the octagon based on UFC rules and defending yourself in real life.  For example, in the octagon you may often see fighters shoot in and try taking down the other fighter to the ground with a technique that puts both fighters on the ground, with the fighter on top in a supposedly better position than the fighter on the bottom.

In the octagon that kind of thing might work, but in real life that kind of thing could get you killed.  For example, you may very well have taken your opponent down and be on top of him, but what if during the “takedown” you end up landing on something sharp that impales both of you?  Or what if your opponent has a buddy that cracks you in the back of the head with a broken bottle while you are in the supposed “dominant” position on top?  Or what if the guy you’re “taking down” has a concealed knife in his pocket and you end up landing on top of it while you take him down?

My point is that as realistic as any sport can get, sports are always based on rules and rules don’t accurately reflect “real life” no matter which way you slice it.

So what does this have to do with making money online?  Well, I’ve been really learning lately that there are a lot of “rules” out there, set out by “make money online” guru’s which a lot of people (including myself) sometimes mistake for “truth” without realizing that these are just theories (forms) as Bruce Lee would call them.

I’m a sucker for “Make Money Online” systems, always willing to shell out some hard earned bucks to learn something new in the making money online world, and it’s paid off handsomely for me in my life but the more mature I grow in my online business the more I realize that a lot of the money I make online breaks some, if not all, of the supposed “rules” that people have out there.

Take for example the 125×125 banner ad so common on most Blogs nowadays.  Who says you have to sell 125×125 banner spots?  Why not make them 250×125? or 125×250? or 387×487?  Now I know some of you may be thinking “Yeah, but 125×125 is a standard and many people have banners of that size already created so if I offer a 387×487 banner spot, it may be harder to sell!”

That’s one way of looking at it, but here’s another.  What if I put the following text on my advertise page:

“After a lot of testing, I have determined that the optimal banner ad size on my website that captures my audience’s attention and generates the most amount of clicks is not the standard 125×125 banner ad.  It is also not the 300×250 or even 250×250.  For whatever reason, I have found the optimal banner size on my site to be 387×487.  It is the best size that generates the most bang for your advertising buck. 

Because I realize that most advertisers don’t have banner ads in that size, I have teamed up with ___________ to provide you with a custom made banner ad for my site in the 387×487 size included in my monthly fee.  Simply send us samples of your existing banners and we will create a custom banner for this site with the design fee already included in my monthly advertising fee of ________”

I mean if I saw that on someone’s Blog advertising page, I would probably want to try it out.  I mean the fact that someone actually put in time to test and find out that 387×487 pulls better than 125×125 on their specific site?  Why would anyone want to buy a 125×125 banner on that site after seeing that?

Of course this is just an example.  What I’m really saying is to stop taking everything you learn from “make money online” guru’s for granted.  Question things.  Go beyond the “rules” that our industry has created for ourselves to see what really works out there in the “real world”.

Here’s another quote from Bruce Lee’s book:

“Set patterns, incapable of adaptability, of pliability, only offer a better cage.  Truth is outside of all patterns.”

So what does this mean?  Should we abandon all systems and all patterns and everything that people teach in the “make money online” community?  No, of course not.  There is a lot of value in systemizing things and learning proven systems that work.  However, don’t become a slave to these systems.  Realize that this is YOUR business, not anyone else’s and run it the way you want to run it.  Don’t allow other people to dictate every aspect of how you run your business, whether that be your Blog, or your affiliate marketing business or whatever else you’re doing to try to make money online.

Learn systems, but then go beyond them.  Trust your intuition more than you
trust any system out there and always be willing to test, test, test.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in all my years of making money online since 1995, it’s that nothing beats testing.  I can’t remember the number of times when I’ve broken industry “rules” to test a hunch I had for something and found out that my real life testing proved the rules wrong. 

I’ve gotten to the point now that when people ask me for my “expert” opinion on what I think might work for their business online, I very often say “To be honest, I have no clue anymore.  The online world changes so quickly that I’m not sure exactly what will work.  I have some ideas of what we could try and what we could test though.”

I have found this attitude present in most of the more mature online money makers, while people who are just starting out are typically very opinionated and attached to a certain set of “this is what works” theories that may have worked once or twice for them and they now treat those things as the gospel truth.

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