The doors open for the first time on your new project, blog, business, or perhaps even your new relationship, and you’re super-optimistic because it’s going to be incredible! You’re going to kick ass, take names, and walk away from explosions in slow motion… because that’s what awesome people do.
But very quickly reality begins to set in and literally everything starts to suck.
You realize it’s tough to blog once-per-month let alone once-per-week.
That new widget you’ve poured your soul into turns out to be a bit tougher to sell than you originally thought.
That fresh new relationship starts to get more serious — and you can fill in the blanks here with the many stresses that come along with it.
This thing you’ve embarked on with starry eyes and a big dream is going to take an incredible amount of excruciatingly-hard work in order to transform into the success you originally imagined. It’s almost debilitating, soul-crushing… even defeating.
But you won’t be defeated! Your will is forged with steel and you push forward into this new darkness, determined to take the difficult steps no matter what gets in your way.
The first signs of confirmation begin to surface. Your hard work and sacrifice is finally being noticed!
Your blog received FORTY views last month! Your new super-widget made FOUR sales last week! You decided to move in with your new love interest, and everything has been pretty amazing so far!
But of those forty visitors, not-a-single-one left you a comment. What’s worse is that two of the forty actually sent you hate mail, or berated you on Twitter because they disagreed with your opinion that the cast of Jersey Shore should NOT be allowed to run for political office… at least on the planet Earth.
Of those four sales you made, one of your customers received theirs broken in the mail. And even though the POST OFFICE delivered the box in shambles, with tire marks and dog feces on it, the customer blamed YOU and left nasty feedback in addition to returning their order for a full refund. This incident alone actually caused you to lose money on that week’s sales!
Your amazing new living partner does tend to leave a mess in their wake. Leaving you to clean a pile of dishes in the sink, as well as the skid marks from their white knickers. You guess this isn’t so bad… but you’re really just wishing you knew each other a little better so you could propose solutions without hurting them so early in your new adventure together.
That perseverance is beginning to fade, and you begin to wonder if this whole thing is actually worth it.
Let’s pause for a second and think this through.
If you fight through the negativity and lack of pay and keep consistently blogging every week like you promised yourself you would, you have a great shot at at least doubling those visits you’re getting each month. In 24 months you could probably be receiving