In 2005, Alex Tew was broke, living at home, and worried that he’d never be able to pay off his business school loans.
Frustrated, he asked himself: “How can I make a million dollars?”
Then came a crazy idea: selling 10 x 10 pixels on his website for $1 a piece. Sell a million pixels and he’d have a million dollars.
The Million Dollar Homepage was born. In just four months, thanks to a viral marketing campaign started on a shoestring budget, his ads sold out.
What you might not know is that I’ve made money selling pixels, too.
Not as much as Alex, but over $50,000 from selling directory listings and banners ads on a now defunct local wedding website my ex and I owned.
It was one of the many money-making ideas I’ve had over the years. Most of them were abandoned (door-to-door bikini waxing) or flopped (selling spirulina supplements.)
A few of those money-seeds grew into profitable businesses.
But one thing has made more money for me than anything else.
In fact, I suspect it’s responsible for ALL the money I’ve ever made, even back to when I was a kid hustling homemade computer cards to the neighbors.
It’s so simple and ordinary, you might dismiss it. So, please promise to keep an open mind. Okay [First Name ##cap_lower]?
Really consider what I’m about to tell you before you move on to the rest of your busy day. Because if you do, this can create a profound shift.
The thing that’s made me more money than anything else by far is…
Listening.
Not just hearing or waiting for your turn to speak. Not even “paying attention” like a good little listener.
I mean listening with a quiet mind, open curiosity, and a willingness to take in everything: words, tone, energy, the unspoken. Listening as if you’re enjoying a piece of music and letting it move through you.
As a coach, listening literally makes me money. The depth of my coaching directly impacts the breakthroughs my clients have.
Coaches often think their value comes from what they say: the penetrating questions, clever metaphors, captivating stories.
Listening is more powerful still, and it’s the fuel behind every great action.
How I wish I could tell you! Well, I can (and am) – how I wish you would really listen.
We spend so much time and energy focused on the forms of life. The content we can see, hear, touch, taste and smell.
We spend our lives captivated and obsessed, chasing the forms we like and avoiding the ones we don’t.
When you listen deeply, you open a portal to the formless, the 99% of life that can’t be seen or touched but holds every insight, idea and possibility.
When we’re focused on the form and our thoughts about it, we’re not listening to the formless.
And it’s in the formless that we find what we’re really looking for.
Michael Neill expresses it beautifully in his book, The Space Within:
“There is a space within you where you are already perfect, whole, and complete. It is a space of pure consciousness – the space inside which all thoughts come and go.
When you rest in the feeling of this space, the warmth of it heals your mind and body. When you operate from the infinite creative potential of this space, you produce high levels of performance and creative flow. When you sit in the openness of this space with others, you experience a level of connection and intimacy that is breathtakingly enjoyable and filled with love. And when you explore this space more deeply, you will find yourself growing closer and closer to the divine, even if you’re not sure there is such a thing and wouldn’t know how to talk about it if there was.”
That’s the space listening takes you to.
But it doesn’t happen by listening for those things (ideas, insights, healing.) Those things emerge from simply being in the space of listening.
Listening to Nothing. Immensely powerful yet powerfully under-appreciated.
So here’s the challenge/invitation:
Spend five minutes a day for 30 days listening to nothing. Do nothing. Let your thoughts move through you like clouds.
Try it and see what happens.
(Spoiler alert: life will reveal itself to you. It always does.)
What do YOU think about listening?
Yours in love and play,
Steph
