Photo by makelessnoise.

Here’s the most inspiring blog post I’ve read in a really long time: Merlin Mann reflecting on 4 years of 43folders. It really is worth reading all of it, but if you’re too busy now, the general gist is that the productivity niche has largely sold-out, and so have bloggers in many other niches. The general malaise: bloggers writing what they think people want to read in order to get traffic and cash in on it, resulting in a whole lot of unoriginal and shallow content, and even more wasted talent.

When something good happens as the result of an action, we’re inclined to repeat that action. We write a list of ‘50 Firefox Extensions to Help You Do ________’ and get a burst of traffic from StumbleUpon. We assume that kind of content is working for us and that we should bring that formula to our blogs/websites in other ways.

Think about this for a second though: if you use any kind of social media, have you ever voted for content without fully reading it because it seemed like something ‘other people with more time would enjoy’, or ’something that would do well on social media’, or something that you ‘appreciated the idea of’ but didn’t make the time to fully read, watch, or listen to? My next question is: do you think you’re the only one? You’re bringing traffic to the blog and probably revenue, but you’re not bringing it your full attention and understanding. Thousands of other people are doing exactly the same thing.

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One of my new favorite voices in blogging and social media is Gary Vaynerchuk. If you’ve never seen any of his videos, here are three that every blogger should watch (1, 2, 3). Interestingly enough, he’s a passionate speaker who consistently restates something both very true and very obvious, yet very ignored: success with blogging, social media and online entrepreneurship is all about ‘hustle’, in other words, hard work, persistence and most importantly, sacrifice.

The point that inspired this post was made at 12mins 15secs in Gary’s recent Web 2.0 Keynote in NYC, where he suggested that an online entrepreneur who wanted to be successful should be prepared to work on their business from 7pm to 2am every night. The audience laughed as if he’d made a joke, but Gary’s face was a picture of seriousness. “It’s not going to happen if you do it any other way!” he said emphatically. Of course, the hours between 6pm and 7pm could be designated ‘family time’ in this fictional schedule. But that’s still 1 hour family time, 7 hours work time (15 if you count the day-job). That’s also five hours sleep every night if you have to get up at 7, and assuming you don’t need any wind-down time before stumbling from the computer to bed. I know whenever I tried this I had emails dancing before my eyes.

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