This isn’t something I just now learned but it’s more that I refined it very succinctly. It is basically thus:
“I can no longer ‘do the right thing’, if in the end, it hurts me.”
I tend to be a very compassionate person (and get taken advantage of more than not), so I doubt I will ever apply this to my personal life, but for business, this is a necessary rule. I will have to repeat it to myself each morning when I awake.
I have always done my best to do what I thought was the right thing. I guess that’s why it irks me so badly when I see people who do not do the right thing. I have this innate urge to do everything in my power ‘to make them do the right thing.’ Anyway, the point is that I’ve continued to do the right thing for the past several years -in spite of knowing that I could profit by going against what I was told was ‘the right thing.’
Specifically, I’m referring to one of my many search engine conspiracies in which all webmasters are told they should not sell advertisements on their websites unless it is done the way Google wants it done. I watched for years as other webmasters profited while I sat back and ‘did the right thing’ by not selling links. In hindsight, my sites in that market could’ve easily generated more than $7,500 per month in additional revenue. Over the two to three years that I refused to succumb to the pressure, that would’ve amounted to at least $225,000 in EXTRA income.
Most people were born and raised to look out for themselves, but I guess I missed that day in class. For me, the moral of the story is that I must -to survive- start to look out for myself and myself alone. If I can better someone else or another business in the process, then great. If not, too bad. I am on the right path now, but is it too late?
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