Success Blog

What I Learned About Going All In, Getting Fired, and Losing $50k

Ian Warner

5 min read

The Going All In Scenario

The goal was to have a flexible full-time job, so I can still work on my side hustle. Everyone has a side hustle now, and I wanted that side hustle to become my only hustle.

That’s the thing, though, and life tends to laugh at our plans. It’s going to look different than you dreamed. Later you look back from the destination, but it seems so different.

I was in one of those places in my life where I bought a house, and I was going to have two young kids soon. My wife had my back, so I was blessed, but responsibility can be heavy on your shoulders sometimes.

• Life Doesn’t Care About Your Plans

Don’t Worry About Feeling Behind in Life ?‍?‍?‍?  ??

One of my friends had mentioned that he wanted a lot of what I had. He was referring to my family, house, and car. I reminded him that there is a blessing and a curse to everything.

It’s a blessing when you can take care of your family, and all are healthy and well. When times are tough, though, the family, the business, and the house can all feel like a burden.

For this reason, don’t rush life. A lot of people feel pressure to rush life. The kids, marriage, and other significant life moves happen because that is what they are “supposed” to do.

I felt this way about buying a house. I don’t think we should have and we were not ready to do it, but I did it anyway because that’s what people do right? You need to be cautiously optimistic and not just expecting everything to workout without any reason. 

• Don’t Rush Life
• There Is No “Supposed To”

You Never Regret Going All IN ?

Am I not doing a great job convincing you to go after your dreams? You may fail like me. You may rack up debt, and you may lose a lot of money, and be embarrassed like I was. You might wonder how stupid you could have been! But you will never regret it.

Life is not about playing it safe. Why not go live in a basement in a safe little box with nothing dangerous around. Have your mom thrown some food at you every three hours? That would be safe.

Living your best life can’t happen until you understand what it means to go all-in. You must know what it means to sacrifice so much that it hurts. Living is when you don’t see how you are going to afford groceries when your kids’ laugh is the only motivation to get up in the morning.

• Going All In Isn’t Safe But Necessary

What It Looks Like When You’re Going All In?

Don’t half step on what you are doing. To be all in means, you are invested with your time, money, emotions, thoughts, and life into something. You don’t leave any of yourself back.

To be all in, I don’t think you can have a plan B. I’m not saying having other plans is terrible. But when you don’t have another way, it forces you to give everything to succeed. There is NO example of success without sacrifice.

What makes success feel so good is the low moments. If it were not for these moments, it would not feel good to have things work out finally. All the things I have been through on my entrepreneur journey, make the end that much sweeter.

• No Plan B
• NO Success Without Sacrifice

What Builds Confidence??

The thing that makes me so confident is that I have the habits of a winner. Like my success in track and field, I had the talent, but I need to cultivate it. I locked in on winning habits. I realized that certain habits lead to success if you stick with them long enough.

If you adopt habits of success and you stick with them, you will win! It’s not different than someone who puts a penny in a bucket every single day. Its a matter of time before it adds up to be more than a dollar. It would not be shocking when the bucket is full. Daily action produces massive results.

What you need to do is line all your actions up so that they produce the results you want. If you’re going to lose weight, eating no sugar daily, working out and eating lots of greens will help you to do that. If you’re going to learn a new language, practicing it every day for 30 minutes will get you there.

Let your confidence come from your daily actions, and the results will come. It takes being cautiously optimistic and the timing coming together just right.