I read a lot of motivational blogs. Blogs to get you moving, to propel you to take action, to get you to be bold, to inspire you to follow your passions and start doing something you love.
Blogs that inspire you to search out your own version of personal freedom. To start your own business if that is what you want to do.
I love reading these blogs. In fact, I write similar motivational posts on this blog myself.
I have noticed one thing though.
With all of this talk of motivating you to take action, quit your 9 – 5 and reach your true potential, they sometimes fail to mention one important point – what happens after you summon the courage to follow your new path.
It’s an obvious point (assumed even – perhaps that’s why they don’t talk about it much), but an incredibly important one, particularly if you are going to be starting your own business.
So here it is.
You are going to be working your butt off.
Building your own business takes hard work. A lot of it.
Forget the 4 hour work week or even the 40 hour work week. You will most likely be working long hours, at least in the beginning. The beginning incidentally, could mean the first year or two (or longer).
I’m not saying you won’t love your work.
Some of it may not even feel like work but some of it will.
There are always bound to be parts of the job you do not like. Perhaps it’s the boring administration tasks, doing the accounts, filing, IT issues or problems dealing with staff.
Let me give you an example. Writing posts I enjoy. Working with code – not so much. I feel like I am going to break out in a sweat every time I have to deal with a piece of code. In the beginning, it looked like a foreign language to me. Most days it still does, yet my blog would not exist without code, so I have to learn how to work with it.
Once you are established, you may be able to farm the work you don’t like out to other people, but in the beginning, particularly if you are a solo business, you are it.
Blogging, in particular, has this misconception of being easy.
You can in fact set up a blog in 10 minutes. My brother did exactly that when he went on holiday recently. Bear in mind, there is a big difference between a holiday blog and a blog based around a business.
I’m not saying one cannot evolve into another but again that is where the hard work comes in.
Many of the successful blogs (that make a lot of money) have been going for a while.
There are always new bloggers who hit the ground running and experience success and money quickly – but again they still have to put in the work. You might be one of them which is great, but you also have to be prepared that you might not be.
If you take a closer look at a lot of the blogs making good money usually they are selling their own products. They sell high-quality products which take a lot of hard work to create, launch and promote. Sometimes their first product might not even do that well and it’s their second or third product that takes off and makes money.
At some point in any successful blog or small business they had to do the hard slog.
If you think you are going to swan in and be a huge success without working hard, you might want to think again.
I’m a big fan of lifestyle design blogs, people that have the freedom of running their businesses from anywhere.
This is where I would like to see myself someday. I know some of these people built their businesses on the road, but it still doesn’t mean they didn’t work hard.
Their businesses didn’t start themselves while the person laid on a beach somewhere. A blogger may grow their blog while they lay on a beach, but a lot of work goes into getting to this point.
Amongst all of that hard work will be challenges.
Most likely one after the other. More likely a whole bunch of them at the same time, usually at the most inconvenient time. Perhaps you will sail through these challenges, perhaps you will be bogged down by them.
I’m certainly not trying to put you off going after what you want. Quite the opposite. You simply need to be prepared.
Understand you will be working damn hard.
Finding a picture for this post was an interesting exercise. When I typed in ‘working hard’ into the search panel, I was presented with either people sitting on their lounges leisurely typing into their laptops or overworked people having meltdowns at their office desks.
In reality, there is a huge range in between.
Then I had the idea of looking for a signpost that had the words ‘hard work ahead’ or something similar. A simple task I would have thought. What I found was a lot of success, results and opportunity signs.
Yet there was nothing about the hard work that is actually required to get the success, results, and opportunities. The focus seems to be on the destination instead of the journey (and hard work) to get there.
Is it all worth it? In my opinion, doing what you love is always worth it. Taking risks, challenging yourself to learn and grow is worth it.
How much hard work you invest in your future and what you get out of it, well that’s completely up to you.
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