Big things don’t happen overnight, even if you pray and hope with all your might. When a site or a product takes off, it always appears to be an overnight success, but dig a little deeper and you’ll soon realize that a great amount of time and effort went into laying the groundwork for success. No matter how you look at it, the great things in life happen quite unremarkably by taking and doing small steps each day.
Wait… what? I can’t make a million overnight?
This viewpoint is seriously unglamorous and certainly doesn’t fit the dream of untold success with little effort that so many marketers are searching for or claiming you can have. So, how do you keep focused and on track when it doesn’t feel like your dreams of prosperity and success are going to happen?
Don’t listen to your ego!
At times, it can be incredibly difficult. Your ego doesn’t want to find out that all this effort you’ve put it could be a complete waste of time and end as a failure. It’s much easier to allow yourself to get sidetracked and use that as an excuse for not doing well as opposed to actually giving your all and it still flopping. Your ego can be a giant time sucker, leading you to do anything and everything except actions that could actually yield results.
It’s a TRAP!
If you fear failure, you’re not fully understanding the benefit of getting into action. Any action towards a goal is beneficial to you. That’s right, I said it… ANY action. Even if the success that you hoped for didn’t happen exactly as you imagined, something positive DID happen. You just need to learn to pay attention to what’s happening and shift your focus to the good things. Stay a little open-minded about what’s going on around you. It’s a trap to think of success as a linear concept.
Are you a victim of inaction?
When you have a lot invested in a project, you may find yourself digging your heels in instead of giving it a running start. There are a few clever ways we mask this inaction. It’s really easy to fall into the guise that we’re busy, when actually what we are doing isn’t getting us any closer to our real end goal. If you find yourself doing any of the following, you’re a victim of inaction.
- Do you find yourself reorganizing your office or desk space before a project?
- Do you need to make sure all your ducks are in a row before starting?
- Are you spending more time trying to learn instead of just trying to do?
- Do you let phone calls and emails suck up the bulk of your most productive time?
- Do you focus so much energy on building your social media network that you don’t have time to work on your actual product?
What should I be doing?
There’s a fairly simple formula for making sure you are doing the actions that will reap rewards in the days to come. Evaluate what you actually do in a day. How many real minutes or hours do you spend doing actions that will legitimately take you closer to your goal? Be honest with yourself. A task or action will either take you closer or farther away from your goal.
Fortune telling at its finest…
If you want to know what tomorrow will bring, take a look at what you did today. If you want X and you didn’t do anything to try and get X today, guess what? You’re not going to get X tomorrow. If you want more visitors to your blog, guess what you need to do? That’s right, do specific actions that will get you more visitors.
So what is it that you want to do?
What have you done today to move yourself closer to that goal?
