Yesterday I wrote an email in which I talked about my current dating model:
I go out on a date with a girl. If we have fun and I like the girl, I propose a second date. If that still goes well, then I go over to her house, sit her down on the couch for a serious conversation, and propose “going steady.”
(At this stage, there’s no ring yet because I reserve that for marriage and marriage comes later.)
After I sent out yesterday’s email, a reader replied with a question I’ve seen before in various forms:
“John… How do you ensure you find out if these women you ‘go steady’ aren’t cheating on you? Just handshake?”
Handshake is a bit too formal for my romantic soul, but the basic idea is there.
I go out with women I reasonably feel I can trust based on what I know of them so far, and I’ll offer to “go steady” with a woman only after we’ve been on a first date or two or three and it’s gone well.
If you’re a regular reader of mine and you’re shaking your head right now, wondering how in the world you have missed this important email in which I talked about my dating life, fear not.
You didn’t miss anything.
Yesterday’s email was not really about women and dates and going steady, but rather about business owners and partnerships I’m doing with them, in various forms, whether that’s emails written on spec (did some of that last year)… or auctions I run and manage for others (did one earlier this year with Derek Johanson)… or my current offer of a free advertorial for ecom store owners (I just delivered the first such free advertorial).
Whenever I write about some such deal, I get a variant of the question above:
“Hey John how do you track sales and make sure how much money these partners of yours have made via your partnership? How do you know you’re getting paid what you’re due? Do you have access to their bank accounts and tax statements and phone records, or are you using some clever affiliate tracking platform, or do you just hire a private investigator to make sure they aren’t cheating you?”
The short answer is, I don’t know.
I take a leap of faith and I see how it goes.
I do protect myself a bit, by not engaging in marriage with somebody I have just met, but instead proposing we have a “first date,” usually in the form of a small and very tightly defined project, something that won’t drain me of too much time or energy if it goes bad.
If that goes well, then we might have a second or a third date, and eventually I will go over to their house and sit them down on the couch for a serious conversation.
There’s a bigger question here.
Rather than just “How do you make sure you get paid what you’re due,” the bigger question is, “What kind of a life do you want to live?”
My personal answer to that is that I want to live a life that doesn’t involve being constantly suspicious of others or chasing in debts.
I also want to live my life thinking that, for every person out there who might actually cheat me once every Halley’s comet, there are four or five people who I could immediately find in their stead who would be happy to partner with me and be honest and fair with me.
I don’t think I’ve ever written an email in which I talked about the idea of “abundance.”
The word has unfortunately gotten tainted by hucksters.
But the fact remains, you can choose to live in a world of scarcity or a world of abundance. Making the mental switch from the first to the second takes a bit of effort, and it takes time before the mental model starts to produce material results. But it is a choice, and one you can make, and get results from.
This entire discussion, by the way, goes back to the one guy I’ve learned the most from over the past couple years.
That guy is Travis Sago. The analogy above, between dating and business partnerships, is Travis’s analogy. So is the idea of offering commission-only deals rather than doing client work that you get paid for upfront. So is the idea of doing a small test project to get a sense whether you can trust people or not.
Travis’s Royalty Ronin outlines dozens of ways that Travis has personally used his wits to make tens of millions of dolalrs online, dozens of ways that people like me have learned from Travis and have made good money with.
But the bigger idea of Ronin is that idea of organizing life in a way that suits you, really suits you, and recognizing the world really can be a place of abundance, including for you.
If you wanna give Ronin a try, Travis offers a free 7-day trial:
P.S. If you sign up for the trial and then decide to stay on past the 7 days because you can see the value for you inside Ronin, write me a message and let me know. I have several bonuses with your name on them.