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E-Commerce Imposter Syndrome – Do We Think Too Small? – 257

Are you sitting on a risky product idea out of fear of failing? Maybe you downplay your success as an entrepreneur because you are afraid someone is going to find out that you don’t know what you are doing. Guess what! We are all faking it until we make it. Many entrepreneurs begin their e-commerce ventures while working nine to five jobs and spending all other waking hours learning how to sell online. The world of e-commerce is fresh and ever-evolving.

Imposter Syndrome is defined as the persistent inability to believe that one’s success is deserved or has been legitimately achieved as a result of one’s own efforts or skills. A lot of e-commerce sellers and entrepreneurs lean into the belief that they just got lucky with their success, but it takes a lot of hard work as well as an occasional failure or two to finally succeed at something.

In this episode of the AM/PM podcast, we are getting vulnerable and honest about the mental side of being an entrepreneur and what it takes to overcome Imposter Syndrome. The secret is that I have it. You have it. We all have it to some degree. It is all about moving forward and through our fear, learning how to catch ourselves when we fall, and getting right back up to try again with a better, stronger mindset.

In episode 257 of the AM/PM Podcast, Tim discusses:

• 3:00 – “Preaching to the Choir”
• 6:30 – The Lack of Education and Funding Affects Many
• 8:00 – Mental Health Intertwines With Personal Success
• 10:00 – Tim’s Experience With Failure
• 12:30 – E-Commerce Opportunities: We Think Too Small
• 14:25 – Juggling It All: Where is the Stability?
• 20:00 – Honda & Harry Potter Both Struggled to Succeed
• 25:15 – There Has Never Been a Better Time to be an E-Commerce Seller
• 26:45 – E-Commerce Imposter Syndrome 101
• 31:00 – How to Overcome Doubting Ourselves: We Set Our Own Limits

Enjoy this episode? Be sure to check out our previous episodes for even more content to propel you to Amazon FBA Seller success! And don’t forget to “Like” our Facebook page and subscribe to the podcast on iTunes, Google Play or wherever you listen to our podcast.

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Transcript

Tim Jordan: In this episode of the AM/PM Podcast, I want to discuss something that I see is massively prevalent in the e-comm and the entrepreneurial space in general. It’s something that I constantly come across, something that I see every day. It’s what I want to discuss in this episode. I hope you’ll stick around to the end. The thing that we’re talking about in this episode is the fact that we as entrepreneurs, e-comm sellers think too small. Take a listen to the end. Hope you get some value out of this. Let’s go.

Tim Jordan: Hi, I’m Tim Jordan. And in every corner of the world, entrepreneurship is growing. So, join me as I explore the stories of successes and failures. Listen in as I chat with the risk takers, the adventurous and the entrepreneurial veterans. We all have a dream of living a life, fulfilling our passions, and we want a business that doesn’t make us punch a time clock, but instead runs around the clock in the AM and the PM. So get motivated, get inspired. You’re listening to the AM/PM Podcast.

Bradley Sutton: Hey guys, Bradley Sutton from Helium 10 here. Quick message. If you’re an FBA business owner, you’ve maybe put thousands of hours of hard work into growing your business, but what happens when you’ve grown it as much as you can and you don’t have the time or resources to take it to that next level? Well, that’s where Thrasio comes in. They acquire category leading FBA brands from small business owners, just like you. They’ve got the experience of acquiring over 125 Amazon businesses, and they’ve seen it all when it comes to managing and growing an Amazon brand. So if you’re thinking about selling your FBA business, visit thrasio.com/helium10 to connect with Thrasio’s deals team. That’s thrasio.com/helium 10. For more information on if your brand is a good fit for Thrasio.

Tim Jordan: Hey, everybody, welcome to the AM/PM Podcast. As most of you, long time listeners know, typically these podcasts are interview style and we bring in people that are experts or have a great story, something to share. Occasionally, I have something that I want to share, and it’s a little bit uncomfortable for me because as I sit here at this table and I’m thinking, “Hey, I’m just going to do a podcast and talk about something that’s on my mind.” I ran across this thing that we’re going to talk about in depth in this episode, which is imposter syndrome. I sit here and wonder, like, why do I have something valuable to share, right? And I’m telling you this, because it’ll make a lot of sense as we go through this episode. But also I’ve noticed that some of the best performing podcast episodes are when I just kind of preach a little bit, right. Because I do get to see a lot. And I get to talk to a lot of sellers, I’m on the road a lot, even during COVID, I spend a lot of time doing things like coaching calls and consulting and talking to people. So, I get a lot of exposure to these different ideas, and maybe, I get a cool birds eye view of the space. So, that’s what we’re going to do today. Also understand that I consider this episode kind of “preaching to the choir,” right? I hope a lot of you understand that expression. I definitely think that preaching to the choir applies here because the lessons and the thoughts and kind of the direction of this episode are definitely also directed at me. So, I’ve got some statements that I kind of want to make.

Tim Jordan: These statements a lot of times, I think are true in this space, but we’re going to go through them. And I’m going to discuss a lot of these. I think that when we’re thinking about thinking too small, the theme of this episode, I think that most e-comm sellers and most digital marketers and most kinds of solopreneurs started out as that. They started off as small sellers of small businesses, right? When I look at the world of Amazon selling e-commerce, most of us started off just trying to make an extra buck, right? I’ve had a lot of guests on this podcast that did the same thing we had. Lori Barzvi is one of my first interviews, who eventually sold her business. We had the bearded picker, Scott Zilke, who was basically buying stuff at garage sales and selling it on eBay to make an extra buck. We’ve got myself. I didn’t plan to get into e-commerce. It kind of happened by accident, right? I was doing my own thing as a firefighter, as most of you know, and then I started getting to these side hustles. I had some other businesses that failed, eventually found that I was pretty good at the supply chain side of things and figured out, Hey, we can sell something online, didn’t even know it could be Amazon. I tried to sell on eBay first and then someone eventually told me, Hey, you should be selling stuff on Amazon. So, a lot of times we are small sellers just because we started that way. It wasn’t intentional. It just happened by accident. It was really done as a way for more stability, but it wasn’t like a planned decision, right. We wanted an extra car payment. We wanted some money for vacations. We thought we could just have some quick flips to get us a little extra money in the pocket, but it wasn’t this orchestrated five year professional plan, right? When I look at e-commerce sellers in general, or entrepreneurs in general, even, especially in this space, I think that there are some statements that I see to be true day in and day out. And the first one, like I said, is that we never planned for this. And we didn’t plan for this because it wasn’t an option years ago, right? This whole thing, especially e-commerce or digital marketing, it’s too new. When I was in high school and we were going through career options, selling online wasn’t an option.

Tim Jordan: When I was going to business school, there was marketing. And I remember some of the big case studies in marketing revolving around branding and brick and mortar stores. I’m not that old, but even when I was in college, this concept of digital marketing was brand new. And the concept of e-commerce selling almost didn’t exist. So there’s no way we could have possibly planned for this. This means that all of us as e-commerce sellers, we got into this very light as almost a last minute decision, right. And because of that, a lot of times it has repercussions. It has implications. Another thing that I’ve noticed is that we don’t have the “education or experience”, right? When we’re running small businesses, we have to be the CEO, the COO, the CFO, the CMO, the warehouse worker, the janitor, everything, right. Nobody, I’m not just saying e-commerce, I’m saying nobody’s prepared to do all of that. We can’t be Jack of all trades to an extent that we’re going to be great at all of that. We don’t have the education. We don’t have the pedigree. We don’t have the experience to actually do all of those functions, right, which creates some problems. Also, small businesses, solopreneurs, e-commerce sellers. We’re often bootstrapped. When you look at businesses in general, especially the startup world today. Most of them are funded by institutional money, you’ve got venture capitals. You might have family members who are investing money, or angel investors. You might have business owners that have already exited another business and had a big nest egg to put forward to this one. When we think about us as e-commerce sellers, typically speaking institutional money isn’t available, or if it is, we don’t know how to go out and get it. Like we don’t have that pedigree, that education, we have the contacts. So, we are frequently bootstrapped, which causes some problems.

Tim Jordan: Another thing I think this is a general statement that’s true about e-commerce sellers is that we get so frustrated and we lose heart and we lose encouragement and get discouraged over things that are seemingly huge. But in reality they are pretty small, right? We hit roadblocks, we hit hurdles. We hit issues that just crush us entirely like knocks all the wind out of our sails, knocks all of the wind out of our chest. And we just feel like that is the icing on the cake. We’re done. We have to quit. We have to stop this potential journey. Right. And we do that because it’s personal. Everything we do is personal. I’ve talked before about the prevalence of mental illness and entrepreneurs, specifically anxiety and depression. And it’s because we equate our personal success and our business success together. We think they’re combined. Right? So, because the things that we do are so personal because we are entrepreneurs, it’s very difficult. We have to prove ourselves, right? We have to prove ourselves to our spouses, our family members, our parents, our colleagues at work, if we’re still working another job. And sometimes we feel like we’re trying to swim upstream against all this hate and negativity. Maybe if it’s not even like malicious hate and negativity, it’s just doubt. The eye rolls and the, “oh, you’re starting your own business. Okay. What do you know about that? You’re a school teacher. You’re a stay at home mom. You’re a construction worker.” When something doesn’t work out like a hiccup, a small road bump, it feels like a boulder has been dropped on our freaking heads. When I first got started right out of college, I was a firefighter, a blue collar worker. We worked shift work. It was impossible to get fired.

Tim Jordan: The old joke was you could go in and take a dump on the chief’s desk and probably get promoted, right. It was a job that people, a lot of times, just skate through for their 25-year career. And they walk out with retirement and they’re done. But I always had that entrepreneurial bug as do a lot of firefighters. And a lot of us have side jobs and side businesses. And I started a landscaping and construction business, right. And we did really high end stuff. We did koi ponds. I did outdoor fireplaces and kitchens and had a lot of stonework and retaining walls and paver patios and things like that. And I thought that I was on the path to success as more of a side job. At some point I had like 20 something employees at like 65 trucks and pieces of equipment. I had Bobcats and dump trucks and tractors, and it was awesome, but I never made a dime at it. I ran that business for six years. At the end of it, I basically had to liquidate all of my equipment for the balance of the loans that I still own. I never paid myself and I was depressed. I was burnt out. I was frustrated because for six years I worked on this business and at the end, I really had nothing to show for it. That’s a personal thing because of all the late nights, putting quotes together on the weekends, working of all the stress and the headaches of employees and trucks breaking down and clients mad because their arborvitae was not the exact size they wanted and just stupid bull crap, right. Going through all that, I had very little to nothing to show for it at the end.

Tim Jordan: It’s frustrating because the people that are around me right in my life saw that it was technically a fail. That’s one of the things that I see happen all the time in e-commerce: it’s the first product launch or it’s the first Facebook ad. We can’t figure it out, it’s always something, right? Another generalized statement, another problem that we as e-commerce sellers, entrepreneurs have is that we listen to other people too much. We really do. And I’ve talked about this before. You can’t take everybody else’s advice. People think that what we’re doing is a scam. People think that we’re not qualified. People think that it’s not for us. I recently became friends with someone who left the education system when they were very young, 13, 14, and did not have a college degree. Didn’t go to university, was a very smart person, but did not have the pedigree. And this person was telling me that their family was telling them the same thing. Hey, you probably are not going to amount to much if you don’t go back and get this traditional education. And that’s a real thing, right? Like we do listen to this influence from others. We have to because we’re human. But a lot of times it slows us down. A lot of times it hinders us. It puts a roadblock in our way. I’ve talked about my father-in-law, both of my parents have passed away and the closest “father figure” I had is my father-in-law. A few years ago, we had a conversation where he told me exact words were, you’re not smart enough to run a business. You’re not. You’re not smart enough to run a business. You’re creating instability in the family with my grandchildren, it was just a huge blow up. It was awful. But it’s real. So these things that happen, we didn’t plan on this. We don’t have the education. We don’t have the experience. We don’t have the money. We’re bootstrapped. We get so frustrated from small failures or hurdles or hiccups. And then we have too many people that we listen to talking to our ears, telling us that we can’t do it. The truth is all of these things combined together to cause us to think too small. We think too small. I go to all these conferences, I go to all these masterminds and yeah, everybody’s excited. Everybody’s joyful. Everybody is patting each other on the back. This is awesome. But when I really look into people’s eyes, I know that the majority of them are frequently, sometimes all of them, are thinking too small.

Tim Jordan: Again, I’m preaching the choir. I do this too. The truth is there is a huge opportunity in entrepreneurism and in e-commerce that we frequently are squandering. We’re wasting this opportunity because we’re thinking too small for all the reasons that I’ve talked about. When we think too small, several things happen. One is, and these are just my observations. I’m sure there’s more to this list, but I’m just kind of going off my observations. One is when we think too small, we don’t go all in, right. We’re too timid. I once had a friend of mine who’s a personal development counselor. And he used this expression of coming and going at the same time, you can’t come and go. And if you see me on YouTube right now, I’ve got one hand waving towards me and another one pushing away at the same time. You can’t do this. You can’t come and go. You can’t be focused on this business when you’re not actually all in. You can’t be reserving yourself and spending your time focusing on one thing when you’re also trying to spend time on another thing, right? We can’t straddle the fence so to speak, to be very successful. Thinking too small puts us in that situation. We’re coming and going, because we don’t feel like there’s enough stability to go all in, right. We can’t put ourselves out there. We can’t put our eggs in one basket. And that’s tough. Another thing that happens when we think too small is that we try to juggle too many things and end up not doing any of them very well, right? A second ago, I talked about straddling the fence because it’s hard to put all your eggs in one basket and go all in. And that’s because sometimes we are either confused. We have preconceived false notions, or we just don’t have the courage, right, to find stability in a place outside of where we currently have it. Okay, now the perfect example of that is someone that’s working a nine to five job employee that wants to start their own business. There is stability in that nine to five job. There was stability in that firefighter position with a salary that I couldn’t get fired from the matter what I did, right. My first day as a driver engineer, I wrecked a half a million dollar fire truck, right. I knew I wasn’t gonna get fired. Now, technically the wreck wasn’t my fault. Someone else from the red light, but even people that just do egregious things, they don’t get fired, right. That stability. And when we see that stability, it’s super hard to say, well, I’m going to leave this.

Tim Jordan: I’m going to leave this platform and leave the stability to go find something else that’s less stable, right? So we think to ourselves, we can do all of it. I could have this side hustle, and I can have this company over here, and I can have my nine to five. And to an extent, there is some truth in that I’m not telling you where to go to leave your nine to five job. I know a lot of people that use that stability for a very long time, while they’re building their business and then step off of it like I did. But the statement that I’m making is still accurate, no matter what stage of readiness to goal and your business you’re at, when we try to juggle too many things, we can’t do all of them super well. Right? Our bandwidth has decreased. There’s only so many hours, so many brain cells, so many resources and so much attention and time that we can give to any one thing. So when we think too small, a lot of times we don’t think early enough or soon enough, or seriously enough, even about making that step into taking your business seriously as your full-time thing. Another thing that we do, and we think too small is we don’t plan ahead, right? We think of this whole thing as a six month thing, a three month thing. I’m going to buy this and flip it, or I’m going to do this little thing and make some money on it. And we’re not thinking big enough. We’re not thinking about that one-year plan, the five-year plan. We’re not thinking about what happens next year, when taxes are due. Have I got my books in order? Have I done accounting correctly? Have I doubled up and gotten multiple options for suppliers and supply chain? If my shipper, or if my sourcing agent, or if my factory lets me down, right?

Tim Jordan: We’re not thinking far enough ahead. By thinking too small. We think too short term. And then the mistakes from that can absolutely crush us. Right? What happens if you’re nine months in, things are going great and your supplier says, oh, we’re pivoting. We’re not making this product anymore. Oh my gosh. If I’d been thinking bigger and planning for potential scenarios like this, maybe we wouldn’t have that problem, right. We need to start thinking about five-year plans, six year plans, 10 year plans, exit plans. Another thing that we do, and we think is too small is we quit too early. When I look back at the things that have been most influential for me as learning lessons, I think about the failures. I think about the products I shouldn’t launch. I think about the business partnerships that got screwed up. I think about my time and focus on things that really didn’t matter. And those small failures turn into giant lessons. Those are my entrepreneurial MBAs, so to speak. They’re the things that I had to learn the hard way through the school of hard knocks for me to get them right. And when we are thinking too small, we let this potentially small failure shake us to the core. And then we let those things prove to us that we can’t do it. If I have a large business or not even a large business, if I have a business that I’m expecting to be large, I have institutional money. I have staff and I have the pedigree so to speak, if a Facebook ad doesn’t work, if one product launch doesn’t work, I brush my shoulders off, say, okay, cool. We keep going. But we as solopreneurs, entrepreneurs, e-comm sellers typically like that one failure just proves to us, oh, we can’t do it like that. That shook us too much. Like it’s too difficult of a hurdle to overcome, right?

Tim Jordan: Thinking too small leads to those things. We don’t go all in. We try to juggle too many things. We’re not planning ahead. We quit too early. So why does this matter? All right. Why does this matter? Why would it behoove us to start thinking bigger, right? Why does this matter? And it’s because we’re all human, right? We’re all human. When I tell people, or I even tell myself, Hey, we need to think bigger. I think about the fact that I’m human and that I have my strengths. I have my weaknesses. And maybe I convinced myself that those weaknesses are too much. Maybe I convince myself that I don’t have enough strength to actually get through, right. But because we’re all human and we have self doubt, and we tend to think smaller sometimes than we should. We forget that some of the most successful business people out there, the most successful business people in the world, had struggles. They had shortfalls. They had failures. When we look at the founder of Honda motor company, he had a lot of failures in his industry. He left school at 15. He became an apprentice in an auto repair shop. He eventually opened his own branch of auto repair shops that eventually closed. And at one point he started creating auto parts for the Toyota company. This is in 1936. All right. So, the guy’s last name is Honda if that gives you a hint. But he was trying to create auto parts for Toyota, and they were rejected. Toyota said, we don’t want your crappy auto parts. You don’t know what you’re doing. Mr. Honda, I can’t begin to pronounce his Japanese first name. It would be atrocious, but he has a quote that I love. And it’s this, “Success is 99% failure.” Alright, let me say that again. From the founder of Honda motor company, “Success is 99% failure.” He didn’t give up, he didn’t let his rejection get the best of them so to speak. Eventually gasoline became really, really scarce, like right after World War II ended and they weren’t getting imports. Mr. Honda here, he offered a solution. Instead of these big gas guzzling engines, he created a small two stroke motor. It needed very little gas to operate. It was adopted by other motor companies. He eventually started his own motor company with a motorcycle in 1949. Then 20 years later, they started manufacturing cars. And since then, Honda’s become one of the largest auto manufacturers in the world.

Tim Jordan: The company is worth billions and billions and billions. If you look back at Toyota, one of the biggest regrets probably would have been turning him down if you think about it. But my point is like some of the most successful people in the world had these failures. They had a slow start. They didn’t have the pedigree, they didn’t have the education. There were auto mechanics, right? He was human. And if he would have let those human doubts and human insecurities stop him, it would have been tragic. But also because he’s human, he was able to do these amazing, great things by stepping outside of his box of comfort and not listening to the naysayers and not taking his rejections as complete failures, right. Long-term failures. And he kept going. Being human means we have strengths and opportunities potential inside of us. Sometimes we forget. It’s just masked by that human, I don’t know, feeling of insecurity and we can’t do this and we’re not competent. My son loves reading Harry Potter. My eight year old son, he can’t get enough of it. The author J.K. Rowling actually started writing the Harry Potter series in the 1990s, after she was stuck on a train and had this idea. She started putting these stories together and got pulled away. She would start putting the story together. Again, she got pulled away. By 1993, her mother passed away. She’d been married. Then she was divorced. The way she puts it, she was left to raise a newborn child on her own. She really struggled with depression. She couldn’t find the time to go all in on this book. She had to work these nine to five jobs, keeping herself stable.

Tim Jordan: Writing was actually like therapy for her. She says she found solace in it. A few years later, she started submitting samples of her book to major publishing firms, 12 of them, in fact, and pretty much all of them told her, no. “Nobody’s interested in another book about wizards and witches,” right? That’s the exact quote. She has a quote and it says, “It’s impossible to live without failing at something.” Even though she felt defeated, she kept submitting her book to publishers about a year later, a year later of being rejected, or after you’re being rejected, she submitted these initial publishings to Bloomsbury publishing and the eight year old daughter of Bloomsbury publishing owner read the manuscript. They decided to publish the novel. Since then they have had 11 novels, three volumes, two screenplays and 10 movies. She’s won countless awards and she’s reached billionaire status. She is now one of the most influential authors of all time. And she loves sharing her story about hitting rock bottom. She loves talking about her hardships. This woman did not have the pedigree. She didn’t have the experience. She didn’t have any of those things that publishers were looking for, she literally had an idea sitting on a train while it was delayed, somewhere. She was rejected for years. She went through all these big issues, right? The depression, the family issues, the raising a child on her own. She’s a freaking billionaire, right? Because she didn’t give up.

Tim Jordan: Now, here’s what I think about e-commerce sellers entrepreneurs in general, right? We have all these things telling us, yes, we need to keep moving forward. We have all these things telling us, Hey, you don’t need to be going forward. You need to stay in the stable stage. You’re not qualified for this. You’re not competent for this. But the reason I think that we need to at least understand this and become aware of this and make informed decisions is because the stakes are huge. The opportunity that we could potentially miss out on is huge. When we think about the way that retail in the world is changing, thousands of years of retail being done the same way in just the past 20 years, it began to change and the big brands can’t pivot, right? The big stores can’t pivot, big stores like Sears and big stores like Toys R’ Us are going out of business. And the small entrepreneurs, the e-comm sellers are absolutely crushing it. All right. We are. There’s never been a better opportunity right now to be an entrepreneur, I believe, and check this out just within the past year, I’ve started noticing that asset growth is happening, right? This isn’t just going from flipping a few things online to selling your own private label brand to some things that are happening. We’re making some money. Now, on Wall Street, investment banks, private equity- they’re realizing the value of this. Look at what’s going on in the aggregator and acquisition space. Asset growth is happening where e-commerce brands used to sell for a one or one and a half multiple. Now, I’m seeing themselves for 7, 8, even 9 multiples, right? We have the resources. We have the tools. We have other examples that we can look out for from other brands that have done it. We have paths that we can start following to do it ourselves. There are so many examples, so many tools, so many opportunities, so many mentors, so many communities we can be involved in. It makes a really big difference when we know that those efforts and those brands that we build in those products that we sell, or those services that we create become very, very valuable assets and they can create generational wealth and generational stability.

Tim Jordan: Let me tell you one of my biggest problems that I have, and this is what I alluded to at the beginning of this episode. I have very serious imposter syndrome. Okay, I’m looking at my notes here through the screen. I’m going to read the definition of imposter syndrome. It’s a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, talents, or accomplishments, and has a persistent, internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud. Okay, let me read this again. Imposter syndrome is a psychological pattern in which an individual doubts their skills, their talents, or their accomplishments, and has a persistent, internalized fear of being exposed as a fraud, despite external evidence of their competence, those experiencing this phenomenon remain convinced that they are not competent, that they’re not capable, and they do not deserve the success that they’ve achieved. Individuals with imposter syndrome incorrectly attribute their success to luck, or they attribute it– they interpret it as a result of maybe hacking the system, or deceiving the system, or deceiving others. Right now, I have that every time and to a degree I’m getting better. When I sit down and do one of these, especially solo episodes of the podcast, I think, gosh, there’s so many better people out there to be listening to, why does my advice or one of my opinions matter? And sometimes I feel like a fraud sitting here trying to communicate this to all you listeners, many of whom are much more smarter, experienced, more successful than I am, but we also have it as e-commerce sellers, right? Like we attribute it to luck. We attribute it to timing. This isn’t a long-term sustainable business. I just got lucky a few times, right? We often have this imposter syndrome. It happens so much to e-commerce sellers.

Tim Jordan: I can’t tell you how many times I have sat at a conference or I’ve sat at a workshop or I’ve sat at a networking event with wildly successful, intelligent, competent e-commerce sellers, that still don’t feel like there are any of those things, right? They’re not doubling down on what they’re doing because they don’t think they can do it again. They’re not trying to help other people because they think they just got lucky. They’re not planning for 10 years if they continue to grow because they continue to think that this is just going to stop. I’ll give you an example. I have a coaching program called the Centurion league group coaching and mastermind program that I run with Norm Farrar. And one of the things that we do a lot of times is we share our own product ideas. And a lot of times, we have members who volunteer to show their product ideas, just for feedback or for ideas or for criticism or for validation. And yes, there are a lot of times when members show their product to these, we’re like, ah, we think you’re barking up the wrong tree here. We think this is a saturated product, probably wouldn’t go down this route, but there are other times people are terrified that we’re just going to rip them a new one, so to speak with their products. And we go through this validation where like, holy cow, this is amazing. Like I wish I’d come up with this product and this can be great. And sometimes we get people that are walking down the right track and then they doubt themselves and they figure, no, I surely am not smart enough to have found this opportunity. Surely, I couldn’t have figured out this niche when nobody else did. Last week, I actually shared one of my products I’m launching right now in the group.

Tim Jordan: We share this stuff pretty openly for education and I’m sharing this product. And one of our members who’s been in the group a long time, raised his hand and spoke up. He was like, “What the heck, man? I found this product like five months ago and decided not to go forward with it.” And I’m sitting there thinking to myself, “That’s interesting.” It’s kind of nice that my product research methods, other people are obviously using correctly because they’re finding the same products. I said, “Dude, why didn’t you go forward with it?” He said, “Well, it just seemed a little too easy.” He’s like, “Man, if I would’ve known that you were there also looking at this product, I’m going to move forward with it.” This usually doesn’t happen. Users do not overlap, but he’s– “Man, I would have been a lot more encouraged.” The truth of the matter is you were on the right track. You were following methods. You were following the right strategies. You actually found a winning product. And even if you would launch it and I’d launched it, there would have been multiple opportunities for us both to succeed at this. It would have been awesome. I wish you would have kept going. Why did you stop? Well, it just seems too easy, right? Like he doubted himself, this happens so much as e-commerce sellers. We think that we don’t actually see the winning formula that we can’t succeed. Right? So, here’s the moral of the story for today’s episode, we set our own limits. Even though we do have shortcomings, we can actually work around them. We can navigate around them. We can figure it out. We can augment our weaknesses with somebody else’s strengths and our strengths with somebody else’s weakness.

Tim Jordan: We can educate ourselves. We can, we can get lucky occasionally and replicate it and keep going. We can have a failure, learn from it and keep going. We can actually, despite our own preconceived notions and our own emotions and our own doubts. We as humans, we as followers of the AM/PM Podcast, and entrepreneurs and e-comm sellers. We can, I promise you, agree to this whole heartedly, we can achieve things greater than we expect. We can. We can create something great. We can involve ourselves in something bigger than us and we can be more successful than we expect ourselves to be. And I do believe that there is no better time than now.

Tim Jordan: I’ll end this episode with a great quote that I absolutely love. It’s by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is the quote. “If you can’t fly, then run. If you can’t run right now, then walk. If you can’t walk, then crawl. But whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward.” I hope that something I’ve said in this episode has been valuable. I hope that maybe one of my crazy ideas resonated or maybe I am just crazy. And if that’s true, let me know, post something in the YouTube comments, post review in whatever podcast platform you’re listening to. But everything that I’ve said that I firmly believe is true. I’m guilty of it. I think that all of us are probably more worthy, more deserving and more capable of more greatness than we think that we are worthy or capable of. So, get out there like Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said, keep moving forward even if you just have to crawl before you can fly. Thank you all for listening. We’ll see you in the next episode.