You must be getting mails every now and then from someone who is starting a new blog. This person is enthusiastic to begin with and is hoping to become the next Steve Pavlina or Darren Rowse. After a lot of study it was concluded that almost everyone underestimates how long it will take.
Typically we hear expectations that they will be cashing big paychecks in six months. People have made less than $50 in the prior sixth months. Being ambitious is good. If you wont have big ambitions you would not be able to start anything. But being ambitious with the deadline can be dangerous.
If You Want to Know How Long, Ask an Expert
It was found that if you want to know how long something will take, ask someone who has already done it. It of course sounds obvious, but few people do it. When you’re motivated, it is easy to think that somehow you can beat the odds and compress the years of work from someone else into a few months.
Setting unrealistic deadlines is a recipe for stress. If you leave your job with the expectation that you can become a professional blogger in three months, you’ll probably be living on the street. Motivation is good. Blind over-confidence is not good.
Be Ambitious With Your Goals, Patient With Your Deadlines
One of the biggest mistakes one can make is to get frustrated when things wouldn’t manifest as quickly as You would like. You will have to work incredibly hard, and few results would come. So, you would work even harder and results would still trickle in. I would burn myself out trying to speed up a timeline that already had it’s own pace. Trying to run a marathon as if it were a sprint is wrong. When you run a marathon, you need the motivation to get started and go the distance. But you need to have the patience to not burn yourself out early on. Sprinters won’t last three miles, never mind the full twenty-six.
Ask the People that Come Before You
Have you heard the mantra, “Figure out how much time the project will take in the worst conditions. Now double that. That is your expected finishing time.” The experts had the battle scars that come with trying to accelerate projects that needed more time.
The new rule for setting goals is to find someone who has accomplished what you want to do (or something similar). Then, you should try to ask them to give you an estimate of how long it will take. That number will be far more accurate than any estimate One can make up.
The Path is Long, Learn to Enjoy It
If you can’t enjoy the process leading up to a goal, it probably isn’t worth starting. The time spent enjoying a win is far shorter than the work leading up to it. If reaching the end is your only motivation to keep going, you probably won’t make it very far.
Always enjoy writing, going to the gym, enjoy taking classes in school, enjoy reading. If you do not enjoy something intrinsically, you can’t push through more than a few weeks. Not one but everyone faces this problem.
If you want to reach a goal, ask an expert. If they tell you 2, 4 or 10 years, ask yourself whether you can enjoy doing something for that long. Don’t just reject the number because you feel you can do it faster. Find a way to enjoy it for that entire time, because it’s the most realistic estimate you’re going to get.
