Why Smart People Struggle To Make Money Online

You have the knowledge. You consume the content. But something's still missing.

I see it all the time in my inbox.

Smart people. PhDs. Engineers. Consultants with 15+ years of experience.

They're frustrated as hell watching some 16-year-old TikToker make $50k a month while they can't even get their first $1,000 online.

They know more. They're smarter. They have real expertise.

Yet they're stuck.

Back in 2013, I was one of them. I had consumed every marketing material I could get my hands on.

I thought I knew it. But I was broke like joke.

The problem wasn't my IQ. It wasn't my knowledge. It was something else entirely.

Information overloads your brain

Smart people love information.

They research. They analyze. They compare options for weeks.

But here's the cruel irony: The more you know, the harder it becomes to act.

You've read about email marketing, but you're not sure if you should use Kit or Beehiiv. You've studied course creation, but you can't decide between Teachable or Thinkific.You know about SEO, but should you take the keyword suggestions from Ahrefs or Semrush?

Every piece of content you consume adds another variable to consider. Another "what if" scenario to worry about.

Meanwhile, that 16-year-old? They just started doing something while you were ruminating.

Action is Key to Progress

You don't need more information.

You need to move your booty.

I learned this the hard way when I finally launched my first course. It was imperfect. The audio quality sucked. You heard kids screaming in the background. The PowerPoint was awful.

A few people bought it. But I learned more from doing it than taking 32 Udemy classes.

Smart people think they need to know everything before they start. But the internet doesn't reward the most knowledgeable person. It rewards the person who ships. And learns from it. So they can ship something better next time.

Take one small step today. Not tomorrow. Not next week. To-freakin-day.

The market will teach you what you need to know and what you should research. But only if you show up first.

You Learn More from Doing Than from Overthinking

Your brain is lying to you.

It's telling you that you need to consume just one more course, read one more article, watch one more tutorial.

But consuming and doing are two completely different skills.

There are people who can recite every marketing strategy ever invented. They're walking encyclopedias of online business knowledge.

I’m pretty sure they also make $0 online.

There’s also people who couldn't tell you the difference between a landing page and a sales page. But they're making $5k a month because they're actually doing the work.

When I started my first YouTube channel back in 2014ish, I spent weeks studying lighting, camera angles, and editing techniques. I bought courses on video marketing. I analyzed successful channels frame by frame.

My first video? It was garbage anyway.

But by video number 20, I was decent. By video 50, I was good. By video 100, I was making money.

The knowledge didn't make me better. The repetition did.

(Side note: I stopped doing videos and appearing on camera completely because I started hating it.)

Bottom line: Stop treating your business like a research project. Treat it like a practice.

You’re just afraid

Smart people hate being wrong.

Don’t ask me how I know.

In school, mistakes meant bad grades. In corporate jobs, mistakes meant getting fired.

But an online business operates by different rules.

Mistakes are data. Failures are education. Every "wrong" decision teaches you something valuable.

I've launched courses that flopped. I've written emails that got me unsubscribes. I've created content that got zero engagement.

Each failure taught me something I couldn't learn from any course or blog post.

The fear of making mistakes keeps smart people trapped in research mode forever. They'd rather consume more content than risk being wrong.

But here's what they don't realize: Not taking action is the biggest mistake of all.

Failure is a better teacher

I failed for two years before I made my first dollar online.

I launched a few blogs that almost nobody read. I created a few courses that nobody bought. I also tried to morph into a high-ticket closer, at which I sucked miserably.

Each failure felt personal. Like proof that I wasn't cut out for this.

But looking back, those failures were the foundation of everything that came after.

The blog nobody read taught me how to write. The course nobody bought taught me about market research. The high-ticket calls made me realize what I’m good at (and what I suck at.)

Smart people often quit after their first failure because they're not used to being bad at things. They've spent their careers being experts.

But online business requires you to be a beginner again.

You'll suck at content creation. Your first sales page will convert terribly. Your initial course will have gaps and mistakes.

That's not a bug. That's a feature.

Every successful online entrepreneur has a graveyard of failed projects behind them. The difference is they kept building on top of the failures instead of letting them stop them.

Your knowledge is valuable. Your expertise matters. But neither will make you money until you stop consuming and start creating.

The internet is waiting for what you know. But it won't wait forever.

Start today. Start messy. Start scared.

Just start.