“Great things take time” ~Unknown
I saw this great card in a bookstore and thought – what a great topic for a blog post!
We live in what I call “a microwave society” where we want everything now, not tomorrow, but right now. We want instant success. Instant wealth. Instant perfect body. Instant this and that. And of course we preferably want it without putting too much work in.
I believe this is much thanks to the internet and social media where it looks as if everyone’s life is perfect and where none of the reality is shared. We only see the end-result or what appears on the outside.
Sadly, too many, especially in the online world, is trying to sell us only the end-result and that you too can succeed overnight if you just buy their course, their book or their material. I don’t know about you but it drives me crazy!
Are there those that succeed building a 6-figure business in 6 months? Yes. But quite often it’s because they either worked a 100 hours a week and hit it so hard they didn’t know what was up and what was down, or because they had prior knowledge that took years to accumulate.
Let’s take a look at the game Angry Bird. Instant success. Well, the backstory to that is over 60 failed games over 8 years. It was an 8 year in the making ‘overnight’ success.
Let’s take a look at one of the most popular podcasts out there, Entrepreneur on Fire, that today makes hundreds of thousands of dollars a month. That was not the case from the get-go. It took time to build that up, with no to little revenue for well over a year. Plus John Lee Dumas hired a $1,000 per hour business coach to help him get to where he wanted to go faster.
Zappos? If you haven’t read the story behind that please do. Zappos was on the brink of shutting down so many times for years due to lack of funds, even after Tony Hsieh sold pretty much everything he owned to fund the company and secure other funding.
Tesla? At one point Elon Musk sold everything he owned to save the company and had to borrow money to pay rent.
We all know the story behind Harry Potter, Amazon and other now big names and how long they had to deal with rejection and not being profitable, taking years and even a decade to become the success we saw.
Pretty much anyone you see having succeeded doing what you want to do have a not so pretty story behind that. A story of hard work, frustrations, defeat, wins, failure, another win, more hard work, crap how will I pay the bills this month to let’s have real sushi tonight.
Can you speed up your path to success? Absolutely. Hire awesome coaches, mentor, join masterminds and surround yourself with people smarter than you. Ask others how they did it. Read books, take a course in marketing, influence, and sales.
That said, don’t let anyone ever tell you it’s easy or that what they have can make you a millionaire overnight or that their program is the only program that works. If it sounds too good to be true, it usually is.
Success takes time, hard work, knowledge, grit and determination to make it happen. It’s not a straight arrow. It’s a roller-coaster of so many ups and downs.
Plus remember, your situation may be completely different that someone else’s. It’s easier for a single person with few responsibilities to hustle pretty much non-stop than someone with a family and kids. It’s easier for someone who has the cash flow to hire the kind of help they need to go places faster than for someone who doesn’t. It’s easier for someone who has years of prior knowledge to package their knowledge into an online course to succeed faster than someone who is just starting out trying to figure out what they want to teach.
Put one foot in front of the other, seek out and hire the best to your ability, surround yourself with people smarter than you and that have done what you want to do, and believe in yourself.
Most of all, remember as you’re working on your dreams and goals that all great things take time.
If you felt this post was of value to you please share with others so they too can learn how to stop spinning and start living. I create these free trainings and blog posts for you. I appreciate you!
