Concerning Working For Others
A user of one of my free membership sites recently canceled his membership. This in and of itself is not a big deal. As anyone who manages a membership site or maintains a list can tell you, members unsubscribe all the time for a variety of reasons. Some discover that the service or list was not what they expected. Some are trying to simplify their lives by limiting the number of opportunities they participate in. And, on rare occassions, a person may be unsatisfied with the service he or she receives.
But on this particular occassion, the member left a comment explaining his decision to leave. It was a one line comment and it said, simply:
I don’t work for others. I work for myself.
I found this to be a rather odd statement. And it’s probably indicative if this person’s level of understanding of sales, service, marketing and economy in general.
No one works for himself. The owners and CEO’s of the biggest and most successful companies don’t work for themselves. They work for their customers and shareholders.
So, too, the lone Internet marketer. His job–his responsibility–is to find or create products and information FOR his customers that fill some need they have. If he can’t do that, if he can’t provide value for his customers–actual or perceived–then he is not going to be successful. We are all working FOR each other, folks, and FOR our website visitors.
John Donne put it best when he wrote, “No man is an island…” He was absolutely right. None of us can make it in online marketing, or in anything else worth doing, entirely by ourselves. We need teachers and mentors…we need writers and programmers…we need friends, advocates and partners…and of course, we we need our customers.
Before I close, I’ll leave you with another famous quote, this one by Bob Dylan:
You may be an ambassador to England or France,
You may like to gamble, you might like to dance,
You may be the heavyweight champion of the world,
You may be a socialite with a long string of pearlsBut you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody,
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody.
Until next time, take care of each other…
- Daniel Joseph Moran
