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What’s Gaining on You?

September 3, 2021 by Shawn Collins

I had a couple of songs that became my sort of soundtrack during my entrepreneurial journey, and they sum up how I was feeling during those years and what was driving me internally.
The songs were “Unsatisfied” (1984) by the Replacements and “Can’t Relax” (2011) by the Dead Milkmen.

Shawn's first affiliate management job

These two songs resonated with me during a time when no business metric, no achievement, award, accolade, or paycheck was enough.

There is a scene in the original “Death Wish” (1974) movie starring Charles Bronson as a one-man vigilante squad named Paul Kersey that I always liked.

This all ties together. I promise.

At one point, one of Paul Kersey’s colleagues commented, “Somebody once said, I forget who… that he never looked back because something might be gaining on him. What’s gaining on you, Paul?”

So ultimately, what was gaining on me was chasing approval from my father, who passed away a year before Affiliate Summit was founded.

He worked for the federal government and as I worked for various start-ups in the late 1990s and early 2000s, he would give me crap for being a workaholic. It didn’t make sense to him that I felt a compulsion to work evenings and weekends, and that I was anxious for Monday to come to get back at it.

The irony was that I wanted him to see me succeed, but working so much didn’t look like success to him. When he was alive, I was starting to build a name for myself writing a marketing column, speaking at conferences, and getting consistent raises and better jobs.

In the spring of 2001, I was really proud to have my first book (“Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants”) published by Que, a division of Macmillan at the time. It was 352 pages of affiliate marketing information that sold well in the blossoming industry.

I gave him a copy and he never cracked it open. It sat on his coffee table. It hurt me that he didn’t have an interest in what was a huge achievement to me. A year later, he was gone.

He was in a medically induced coma for weeks. In his last days, a nurse asked me what he did for work and I was petty and angry that he never read my book, and I said he wrote boring stat reports for the government.

I regretted that for a long time and hoped he didn’t hear me. I was impressed by the work he did and the reverence he received for it.

When we cremated him, my brother and I included some things that had meaning to us to be with him from then on:

  • Sheet music for the piano for “See You Later, Alligator”
  • Autographed baseball from David Wells
  • Yankees World Series 1998 baseball cap
  • 2002 Yankees media guide (he wanted it for Father’s Day and he was gone before I could give it to him)
  • A copy of my book

He was going to be stuck with my book for eternity. We sprinkled his ashes in places that were special to him: Yankee Stadium, the beaches of Wildwood, NJ, and the Pocono Mountains in Pennsylvania.

My chance to impress him and show him I could be a success had ended. I felt like I was a failure in my dad’s eyes.

It didn’t help many years later when his sister told me he was very worried about me after I graduated college because I was sort of rudderless for a while. I didn’t know what I wanted to do and spent some time as a front desk guy at a hotel and as an assistant manager at a Blockbuster in my hometown.

It was no coincidence that Affiliate Summit began in 2003 – less than a year after he left us. I went about working on that, as well as my full-time job in NYC, and a bunch of consulting, projects, and websites on the side.

Affiliate Summit West 2005

As my star continued to rise, I continued to work hard. It was my identity and my pride, but it was never enough. At some point, I remembered the song “Unsatisfied” by the Replacements. I had it on vinyl from my high school days from their album, “Let It Be.”

I found myself playing it over and over on an old record player I’d gathered from my dad’s house. It was just how I felt and it wasn’t something I felt comfortable sharing with anybody…

Look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied
Was you satisfied?
Look me in the eye, then tell me that I’m satisfied
Hey, are you satisfied?

I wasn’t satisfied. Not by a longshot. By 2008, when I’d stopped working my corporate job and closed out my consulting work, I was focusing solely on Affiliate Summit.

I worked more than when I had multiple jobs. I knew I could never make such a fluid thing perfect, but that didn’t stop me from always trying to perfect it.

In 2010, I moved to Austin and found a life/work balance that I hadn’t bothered to pursue before. It felt better. I was more settled, but not relaxed. I’d see people just chill all of the time and I didn’t understand it. I couldn’t do that, because there was always more to do.

The Dead Milkmen came out with an album called “The King in Yellow” in 2011, and deep into the tracks (15 out of 17) was a song called “Can’t Relax.” It was silly and it was my truth.

Four letter words can have two meanings,
Love, Bleep, and Bleep to name a few,
Sometimes it’s something that you’re feeling,
Other times, it’s something that you do.

Sometimes life is like a puzzle,
With all the pieces on the floor,
And they don’t seem to fit together,
But then the pieces become a door.

I can’t relax, so don’t tell me to relax,
I can’t sit still, so don’t tell me to sit still,
I can’t relax if you tell me to relax,
I can’t relax.

It all comes down to electrons,
Conveying meaning with a spark,
The yin and yang, the ones and zeros,
The push the pull, the light and dark.

In the World of Rod McKuen,
Heat is sound and love is food,
Take life slowly and with feeling,
To gain a winning attitude.

In 2017, we sold Affiliate Summit, and with that, I felt satisfied. I discovered how to relax.

Celebrating the end of our Affiliate Summit days

Nothing was gaining on me anymore. I am sure if my dad was still alive that my first book would still be unread by him, as well as the books that came after. And the reality is that they are pretty boring subject matter for anybody not living and breathing it.

But he would have been proud to tell my story to anybody who listened.

Sorry about the book thing, dad.

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Filed Under: Random Stuff Tagged With: Affiliate Summit, Charles Bronson, Dead Milkmen, Death Wish, Paul Kersey, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants, The Replacements

Hustle Porn Will Ruin You

January 22, 2020 by Shawn Collins

I was hanging out with relatives over Christmas and the topic of leisure time came up. Some of them went on about how they were too busy for TV and movies and even friends. Those were indulgences that got in the way of work.

I get it. That was me once upon a time. I was convinced that time not working was time wasted. I was wrong, misguided, and a sucker for the whole hustle porn ethos.

And while hustle porn has porn in the name, it’s not a sexual term. It’s basically the fetishizing of people in tech who overwork. Their lives are all about work and nothing else. That’s not exciting or interesting. And it’s damn sure not something to aspire to.

But people eat it up on social media. The Instagram pictures of early cars to the airport, long days in meetings and on phone calls and speaking engagements, and then red eyes back home in time to rinse and repeat.

It took me a while to understand that. Back in the late ’90s when I was getting into affiliate marketing, I was hungry to make a name for myself, learn everything I could, and put in whatever time and effort it took to achieve it.

Early on I didn’t brag about it or tout it to anybody. I just worked like crazy. Back then I was living in New Jersey and commuting three hours round trip to New York City each day to my first affiliate marketing job at Medsite.com.

Shawn at Medsite

At the same time, I was working on my first affiliate site, Velocity NYC, which was a guide to things to do in NYC with affiliate links to related books on Amazon. I was also working on a site called BabyLounge where I created online birth announcements with a few paid options, plus I monetized those pages with affiliate links. An extension of the baby theme that I also promoted from the site was a baby naming software I private labeled and sold through ClickBank.

There were a bunch of other affiliate sites then, and they were all hand-coded in HTML.

A friend who was a ticket broker asked me to create a website for him, and I ran that for years, too. It was frequently updated with new events and it had a bunch of satellite sites for things like the first George W. Bush Presidential Inauguration. In addition to the web work, I was running PPC for him with constant adjustments.

All of the stuff outside of my 12-hour workdays also had to fit in after my Saturday and Sunday morning job as the sports editor for NJ.com (the web version of the Newark Star-Ledger newspaper). I would do that each weekend day from 6 AM to around 10 AM.

By 2000 I was running the affiliate program for ClubMom.com and I was also writing weekly columns for ClickZ.com, and occasionally for other publications on affiliate marketing. That got me noticed by Que Publishing, who offered me a book deal (Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants). The catch was that I had a few months to write hundreds of pages. I got it done.

But around that time I noticed cracks in my non-stop work life. It was a Sunday and I had enough. I felt miserable and overwhelmed and dissatisfied. I guess it wasn’t a full-blown nervous breakdown, but it was a breakdown. Or maybe an anxiety attack.

Shawn Collins at ClubMom 2This would happen again from time to time as we started up Affiliate Summit while working a full-time job, managing other affiliate programs on the side, running affiliate sites, and doing a good amount of consulting on affiliate marketing.

We didn’t make any money on Affiliate Summit for the first 18 months or so, and I worked full-time as an outsourced affiliate manager for a bunch of companies for the first five years of Affiliate Summit to make ends meet.

Have a look at this cringey hustle porn video I made in those days titled “Day in the Life of an Affiliate Marketer” – I made this without a hint of irony. I was proud and impressed with myself.

I barely slept, I didn’t take vacations, I didn’t really do much of anything but work. I had no balance. I didn’t find that balance until moving to Austin in 2010. It was the best decision ever to relocate and embrace downtime, the outdoors, vacations, fun, and more sleep.

And a lot fewer hours of work daily. The result – I didn’t have any drop in productivity. I was so busy being busy that I didn’t have time for anything else all that time. But that busy was a mirage, a waste, and a lie. It can lead to ruin and burnout.

Replace rise and grind with rise and shine and you’ll be doing yourself a big favor.

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Filed Under: Affiliate Resources Tagged With: ClickZ.com, ClubMom, hustle porn, Medsite, Refer-it.com, rise and grind, Successful Affiliate Marketing for Merchants

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