Time ClockThose who know me well, my friends, family and colleagues, read the claims I make about my blogging and laugh.

As per the Blog Mastermind sales page and throughout the Blog Profits Blueprint, I claim that I only work two hours a day to generate the around $5000 a month income from my blogs and related projects (forums I purchased with profits from my blogging).

The people who see me on a regular basis would tell you that I work a lot harder than just two hours per day.

So is my claim a marketing gimmick? Is it something I state just to lure people in with dreams of an easy working life for a high financial return? Am I using some kind of trigger to convince you that my program is the answer you have been looking for?

Well yes and no.

Yes in the sense that having a claim that is desirable and something compelling enough that people would hand over money to learn what it is all about, is a requirement for my offer to be successful.

If I used something like – Work 40 hours a week and if you are lucky you might just make a full time income from blogging – not many people are going to join. Heck, I wouldn’t join either, who wants to work 40 hours a week for $35K a year!?!

The reality is that my program is designed to teach what I really do – I really work about two hours aggregate per day on my blogs to produce about $5000 a month in income. However I spend a lot of the rest of my time doing other work, which tends to add up to 4-10 hour “working” days on average, including weekends sometimes too.

How Many Blog Posts Are Enough?

At the moment my blog gets around 3-5 new posts per week. If this blog was brand new and I had no following I’d struggle to grow it with such a slow publication schedule. With the benefit of time and previous hard work put in, and of course the fact that I do things and think things that other people find interesting and beneficial to read, watch or listen too, I can spend a few hours every second day writing new blog posts and still keep my blog growing and profitable.

It won’t grow at the same pace as other blogs that publish daily content and it may not make as much money either (although I think I monetize pretty well compared to most blogs), but as a lifestyle, it’s pretty good and something I think everyone would enjoy, hence the Blog Mastermind program exists to teach how to develop my lifestyle.

I tell my students that “three posts a week” blogging is not good enough early on, unless each post is a good 2000-3000 words long, in which case you should probably break them down into smaller parts anyway (I really should take my own advice).

Once you build momentum, once you have a following, then you can settle back and publish at a pace that is frequent enough to keep people coming back, but infrequent enough that your life doesn’t have to be spent all day writing and researching.

So Why Do You Still Work So Many Hours?

Like most entrepreneurs, I’m not good at doing nothing. I’m actually pretty bad at taking holidays, at least long holidays with days spent doing not much at all.

I prefer taking holidays for “hours at a time”, maybe even a whole Sunday, but never more than a few days in a row. I like to be productive and without work I tend to struggle. I need the stimulation and that feeling of swimming forward – the process of creation is critical for my happiness.

Yet working can’t last too long either, it must be punctuated with long breaks spent cooking, exercising, reading and watching DVDs (both for entertainment and education).

The key for me is balance and variety, no one activity should ever last too long and freedom to stop something at any time must be an option (which is why working for someone else is NOT an option).

I have goals to meet, goals that I enjoy working towards so I remain motivated to work longer hours to meet them.

As always, why you do what you do comes down to your motivation and your motivation is (hopefully) derived from your vision, or at least things about your life you want to change. I also argue that your vision stems from some form of basic agitation, human conditions that agitate you enough to force you to take actions to remove the agitation.

So essentially I keep working so hard so I don’t feel agitated. Nice.

Then again, many of the present agitations I feel, that you feel too, are illusions. Society has created and magnified some agitations, like the desire for certain material items, to earn a certain amount of money or wear certain clothes.

Many of these desires have been manufactured and amplified thanks to advertising and social conditioning. When your peer group follows a certain path you are inclined to do the same and hence we all work to reinforce beliefs that simply make us feel more agitated. Nice work everyone.

Re-Evaluate The Reason Why

It’s important whenever you feel agitated or frustrated at your present situation and your lack of a certain thing, that you stop and look at why it is you want what you are seeking so badly.

In some situations when I take the time to reflect on what I am doing today and what today’s effort is meant to bring me tomorrow, I realize that sometimes I make terrible choices.

After reflection I determine, in most cases, the little green eyed monster is pushing me, making me do things I don’t want to do. That monster is money, and while we all love the stuff, it tends to make us do things we don’t need to do and feel inadequacies that don’t really exist.

Having been through this cycle many times – working hard, becoming agitated, re-framing my motivation to feel better, working hard again, etc – I’ve come to realize that sometimes it is a better choice to simply keep doing what works already, rather than always look to do more.

The path to less agitation is not through working harder to create something that is meant to remove the agitation. You need to remove the agitation from where it really comes from – within you.

If you take away your desire for something – and usually it’s a desire manufactured or amplified by society – then you no longer feel the agitation.

That sounds easy enough right. Take away your desires and you never feel agitated for wanting something you don’t have.

Of course it’s not as simple as that, those human conditions I mentioned that are the root cause of the agitation must be met at a base level. That’s fair enough and we need that basic drive or we wouldn’t do or accomplish anything.

How Much Is Enough?

I’ve heard people say that for the average person in western society, about $100,000 a year (or equivalent currency where you live) is enough to be happy. You can cover you basic needs and have enough left over to indulge in other things.

I don’t necessarily agree with that figure and I’m sure many of you reading this don’t either, but I do agree with the sentiment. We don’t need nearly as much as we think we need.

As a single guy, earning $5000 a month working a ten hour week is enough. I can’t argue that I really need any more than that to enjoy most of what life has to offer.

You might have a family or live in Tokyo or New York or Paris where the cost of living is higher, or perhaps you live in Romania or India where $5000 US a month would be enough to live like a king. Whatever the situation, there is a point where you have enough and it’s critical you understand what that amount really is.

For me, I continue to remind myself that my current situation is a blessing and if I choose to just blog, just write words to this blog and continue to make a decent living from it, I could keep myself sustained and enjoy the process for a long time.

Best of all, simply by continuing to do what currently works, my blogs and income should continue to grow. There is a good chance in a year from now my income will be at minimum 25% higher without putting in any more effort than the current levels now (assuming the Internet doesn’t explode or something).

That’s a comforting thought, one that I remind myself of whenever I become out of alignment and I feel agitated.

You may not be in the same situation as I am, but I bet you still have it pretty good. You may not think you can work a two hour day, but I bet if you took a solid two hours of your day and put it towards some form of leveragable income source, that it won’t be too long before you are just like me.

The ideal situation is to always have something you are striving towards without it becoming a point of agitation, and yes, the journey is really more important than the destination.

Enjoy what you do today and don’t always focus so much on what you want tomorrow. That way, when you realize your goal of working when you want for as long as you want, that you choose to do things not because you always want more, but because you want to go through the experience of working towards that more.

I think my two hours is up…

Yaro
Blogging Two Hours A Day