Where are you going? Which direction is your career headed in? Is your life and your career thriving?
Ask yourself those above questions whenever you think that your current position is your final destination. It's very hard to start a blog or business and think it's going to thrive within 3-6 months (don't play yourself). So what do you do when things don't take off in the time frame that you imagined? Let me know if any of these below ring a bell.
1) GIVE UP.
2) Compare yourself to others in your field.
3) Make excuses on why you're not succeeding.
To a lot of us any of those three sound familiar (don't lie). The image to the left is perfect for this blog. The boat might take a while to get to it's destination but the scenery might be great along the way. The famous quote "life is a marathon, not a sprint" is something that I live by. To think that I can just sell a million books as an author in the beginning of my author journey would be delusional. I've always been in love with the process of storytelling and how it can help people on a daily basis. I had no choice but to fall in love with the marathon process in my career because it built character. The people that want to sprint right out the gate are usually the ones that give up after 3 months when they don't see the results they hoped for.
What happens when you want to rush to a thousand blog views or maybe sell three hundred t-shirts in a month of your new clothing brand? What happens is you don't fall in love with the process of getting to that stage. A guy like Bill Gates might go to sleep happy because he is a multi-billionaire, but another thing he smiles at is the memories of him starting Microsoft in his garage at 19. All those years of hard work he put in to get to the point he's at today is really the meat and potatoes of his business.
Some days I might stay up to 2AM just writing or doing some research on a project. For years this has been my process and it's the reason I can appreciate my success. Put your blinders on and don't worry about the people in your field who are successful. The truth is that those people have struggled for years to get to where they are. They knew that where they were 3-4 years ago wasn't going to be where they are today. BELIEVE IN YOURSELF AND YOUR PROCESS.
WHAT ARE YOUR THOUGHTS?
Alex Owumi is a professional basketball player and bestselling author of Qaddafi's Point Guard, The Fire Raven series and The Man In Forest Hills. You can view his website here.
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