Forum Moderators: martinibuster
What if you were making more than you dreamed of two years ago. Say you worked your butt off for 6 years on something and it finally pays off large. But you keep tweaking, fighting for more, even to the negative of your health or quality of life. It's that never-give-up, driven work ethic that got you there in the first place...so do you change that and suddenly relax? Can you even relax if you try? Or do you just stay driven every day for the rest of your life? Maybe you already surpassed your goals by huge margins but you want to keep that increase going. Say you multiply your earnings by 4 one year, and then 10 times that the next year, and then you aim for even more the next. Do you get disappointed when a day or a week is down (in Adsense or other revenues as well), even though it's so many times more than you may have dreamed of previously? Will you ever retire or are you addicted to starting a business? Should you ever stop if that is what makes you feel alive. I enjoy a three week vacation but then I feel like I'd die if I took more than month off.
What if you should be very happy, enjoying your family and traveling or doing whatever you like to do but instead...you are working harder, feeling the need to keep the graph going upward. And what happens if you reach super high amounts and then lose it all for whatever reason? Could you handle it, since anything that can shoot up can also take the same track back down.
My theory for a solution and sanity: I think it's important to live below your means and try to have fun every day (of course in my case, I have more fun working for myself than most things). If you want anything nice, no matter how extreme, pay cash, enjoy it and don't go into debt based on higher dollars. If you can pay cash for it, at least it's your whim and you won't be reminded about for the next 5-20 years. Always keep your bills low enough so you can go to work at the local home improvement store if you have to...and survive. The web wasn't around for us 15 years ago and who knows what it'll be like 15 years from now, so I don't think every single entrepreneur can count on it for the rest of their working lives.
Does this keep anyone else awake at night or make you keep working harder and harder in a spiral?
What really sucks is when you hit your peak and can't reach it again.
I don't think you have to have a peak. My earnings have been increasing steadily over the years as has the growth of my site. There is no ceiling to how large my site can be, the amount of content added or the amount of traffic I can receive.
Just take a look at what Markus has done.
I was making a point that if all you do is measure the success of a site by adsense - if there is a hickup with adsense and it starts to fall - you'll be really tense.
That is why it's important to have other site goals not just monetary - and diversify the income streams.
The good thing is that by January, our Adsense income (and all metrics - CPM, CTR) increased by 100% compared to our previous highest income back before Jagger hit us in September. Hopefully it stays at this level.
But the mere thought that income could drop like a rock cannot make me relax one bit with Adsense. Since June 2003, it was up and up - then BAM! The 4th quarter of 2005 our earnings were up to par during 4th quarter 2003. It hurt A LOT! That is one experience I do not want to experience again.
