Making money is a skill
It’s a thing you learn, not a thing you do
Hi, it’s Melissa, and welcome (back) to “your founder next door”, a weekly publication with stories and tidbits of my human journey bootstrapping eWebinar to $5m ARR. No BS, just straight-up truth bombs on what it’s like to build a company without an abundance of resources or friends in high places.
In The Almanack of Naval Ravikant, he said, “Making money is not a thing you do, it’s a skill you learn.” I loved that framing.
I’ve quoted Naval in a few past articles now. He has a way of deducing years of layered experience into something that’s almost annoyingly obvious.
When I read that line, I felt a wave of relief. Because if making money is a skill, then I have full control over my financial outcome. This perspective helped me reconcile with where I’m not yet. I just haven’t upleveled enough and I can accept that.
It’s been 15 years since I started my first company. I’m on my third now. All things considered, I’ve done okay. But, I’ve never come close to the kind of financial success I’ve watched other entrepreneurs achieve. The kind I’ve quietly envied for years.
I’ve spent all of last year untangling my own limiting beliefs, and that internal work was real and necessary for me to keep moving forward. This reframe about money is another thing.
When I look at my life in rewind, I can say I’ve worked very hard. I’ve tried to be as strategic as I knew how to be. But I have never put in the work to truly acquire the skills required to build a great company.
The only skill I’ve gone deep on is sales. That was my background and what I did before I became an entrepreneur. But marketing? Customer success? Operations? Networking? Curiosity? Creativity? Resourcefulness? All the ingredients required to be ultra successful... I hate admitting this, but I’ve only dabbled in those.
I’ve always wanted success. I’ve always tried hard to get it by doing all the things I thought I was supposed to do. But that’s all I did.
I’m launching Season Three of ProfitLed Podcast in two days (stay tuned), and over the last few months I’ve been interviewing some exceptional founders. People like Peter Hwang, who built six businesses over 28 years and had two back-to-back eight and nine figure exits in 14 months, after losing everything in his previous company.
I sat across from Peter, in awe and inspired, as he shared stories of his journey and what drove him to keep going and ultimately have a $263m exit at 45. Completely self-made. I know for a fact that I am not as skilled as he was when he was my age (42). He talked about navigating near-bankruptcy, rebuilding from nothing, timing market opportunities, figuring out things that were completely foreign to him; I can’t even imagine myself doing half that right now.
Peter’s story was an example of what mastery looks like. Someone looking at me might think I’m successful. I might be, relatively speaking. I’m grateful for what I have. I also know that if I had taken the time to learn the skills I needed, I could be two, maybe three times more financially successful than I am right now.
The reason someone else might not be as financially successful as me is not because they’re not capable. It’s because they haven’t acquired those skills yet.
This is why I love thinking about making money as a skill. I can control all of this. It is not about where I came from. It’s not about how big my network is. It’s not about what I know today. Everything I want to achieve is within reach because I can go acquire the skills that will change my future.
We give ourselves a lot of excuses, myself included, for why things didn’t work out. We compare ourselves to others even though we know comparison is the thief of joy. We tell ourselves stories about why it worked for them and not us.
The truth is simpler: we haven’t done the work to learn the skill.
By skill, I don’t just mean operational skills like sales, marketing, fundraising, or hiring. I mean the mental and emotional skills too. The skill of resilience. The skill of identifying opportunities. The skill of being able to walk away from one thing so something better can come in. The skill of believing you deserve success.
Every single one of those is a skill. Every single one can be learned.
What I’m doing differently now is taking back control of my own narrative. I’m not blaming any external circumstance. I’m actively looking at where my gaps are and what I need to learn to get the outcome I want. That’s a very different way of approaching life.
I now come from a place of possibility instead of limitation. It’s opened up a world that makes me believe not that “if I work hard, it’s possible,” but that “if I figure it out, it’s possible.”
All the best things in life are hard because mastering any skill takes time.
Whether it’s practical like sales, marketing, operations, or something more human like being happy, learning to love, or learning to receive love. The things that give us the most in life are the ones that take the most effort to get good at.
The great news is we don’t have to leave any of it up to chance.
You can have anything you want, as long as you recognize that you need to go and acquire the skills to get it.
(🎙️ BTW, ProfitLed Season Three is about Passion, Profit, and Purpose, and how those things shift as founders come into financial success. Hit follow on your favorite podcast app and be notified when it launches Wednesday. Find it here: Apple, Spotify, YouTube)
Till next time,
— Melissa, your founder next door ✌️
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Love your honesty and openness (like always 😬)! This is actually something I realised when watching my kids struggle for weeks and months to figure out a new skill that feels completely normal for me as an adult, like standing up or crawling: I think as adults we forget how hard it is to learn something completely new. At some point in our life we stop learning new things and move to expanding expertise on topics we already know a lot about. That’s much easier. So we just assume something new works after 2 or 5 attempts as well and get frustrated if it doesn’t.
I don’t know when I last put the equivalent of 2 months every day most of my hours into learning something completely new (that’s how long my daughter needed to move from standing on all 4 to crawling).
Healthy perspective. It's all balancing inputs and optimizing for outputs.
I'm your age and while there are some parts of that equation that get harder with age, I think I'm getting better at prioritizing and predicting outcomes better each year. So the "wrong side of 40" does have its perks.