Has building your own business been tougher than you expected?
There are some out there selling “easy success” if you just follow your passion, or follow the money, or follow their system, or follow… whatever the current trend is.
Of course, there’s some truth in that. Do something you care about. Make sure there’s financial possibility there. Follow systems that work (you can get a lot further, a lot faster, by listening to people who’ve succeed at what you want to do and mirroring them).
But that’s still no guarantee of easy, fast success. It requires effort!
Whoever said it would be snap your fingers easy every moment along the way was wrong. There are bad days. There are tough moments. There are rough roads.
But you choose how you respond to it. Those bad days can be reduced to bad moments. The rough roads can be just another adventure & learning experience. It’s all in your perspective.
What’s stopping you from achieving the success and income you want in your business?
It’s not the challenges you run into… there’s always a way to overcome each challenge, just waiting for us to figure it out.
Click here if you can’t see the video above.
Have you overcome a challenge to start or grow your business? Inspire someone else today by sharing in the comments.
I think one of the challenges to making money online is patience. If I had thrown in the towel at every obstacle that showed up, and listened to the hype instead of doing the work and building the profits slowly, I wouldn’t be successful today. My income is a direct result of sticking with it and being determined to stay focused long enough to make it happen. Patience was the key for me.
Definitely. I love hearing the back stories of successful businesses because while they can look like an overnight success, the owners usually stuck out challenges, sometimes failed businesses, other ventures that didn’t work well, changed paths along the way, or found a great idea in the beginning but grew it slowly to success.
No easy answers to making money on line Michelle.
The people who make money know what they are doing and… they work hard.
That easy life that the internet seems to offer is perhaps not so easy after all.
I have a full time job and just dabble with my blog, but even dabbling takes time.
Writing posts is just one thing, you have to learn about WordPress, FTP, plugins – lots to know and it all takes time.
That’s a big part of what takes time for us I think — if we’re not starting out with a lot of money to invest, all the “do it yourself” jobs take time (websites, accounting, marketing, etc) that aren’t exactly what we want to focus on.
Totally agree with the above comments. Building any business takes time and work. I started my business as a therapist back in 1994 and it took time to grow. I had to spread the word and build slowly, but the rewards were worth all the effort. The same is true for the online business I’m developing at present. When I first came online it seemed as though everyone was telling me how easy it was and this just didn’t ring true. I’ve now found people who are telling me the truth and I surround myself with them and trust them as I see how they’ve grown their own business. It does take time, it does take hard work, but the benefits are worth it.
Hi Heather
” I’ve now found people who are telling me the truth” – agree with you on that.
Lots of people telling us what we perhaps should have known all along… time dedication and hard work.
However, still lots of people out there selling get rich overnight schemes, and lots of people buying them!
Glad your various ventures are doing well.
I’ll second that motion from Keith, Heather!
Since you’ve already gone through all the ropes, the red tape, the ups and downs, and the toil and sweat of building an offline business …
It was easy for me to put my faith and trust in you from the moment our paths crossed. I felt an immediate and genuinely warm and wonderful sense of transparency from you.
In my opinion …
Money talks. But experience talks louder!!
I think sometimes we confuse “easy” and “simple” — something can be simple (follow steps A, B, C, D, E) but not “easy” because it takes time and energy.
And yes, Melanie, money talks. Sometimes it says “success!’ and sometimes it says “charlatan!”
Sometimes it takes letting go of the “shoulds” in your life and realizing you can’t control ALL the outcomes. Work on the things you can control – like your thoughts. Focus on activities that support your goals – but the key is “work on them.” Wishing them into existence or hoping the right thing will come along or buying into a new program because it seems like it will solve all your problems instantly usually doesn’t cut it. You’re right, Michelle. It takes hard, focused work. Which is harder for some of us than others. Martha commented about quitting. You can’t quit – not until you’ve exhausted your internal potential. Don’t give up on yourself just because someone else doesn’t believe you can do something. If that were the case, I never would have started my writing business. Today, I can say, “I knew I could do it!” Doing it just took longer than I expected.
I’ve said it in the recent past and I’ll say it again, Lis — “Phooey on the naysayers!”
You knew and could most likely predict with 100% accuracy “you could do it”. That’s all that matters.
I love this line in your comment …
“You can’t quit – not until you’ve exhausted your internal potential.” Thanks so much for sounding that out loud.
I’ll second that “phooey!” We knew you could do it, Lis!
Thinking about how you said we can’t quit until we’ve exhausted our internal potential… what a great thought! The amazing part is that through our own businesses we discover that not only are those nay-sayers wrong, but we didn’t even realize how strong we were until we got to those tough moments and pulled ourselves through them to succeed.
Michelle,
The technical issues were the hardest for me to get over. I took a tremendous amount of time to figure things out. The best thing I ever did was to buy a course that made me face the technical side head on. I not only learned tons of techniques. I also learned to ask. I found people I could trust and asked. This has actually speeded up my technical learning curve.
I found the same thing, Sheila. When I started investing in courses like that I learned so much quicker! For me it was marketing that I needed to dig into and learn from the experts. It’s amazing how fast we can learn from the right teachers, isn’t it?
I so agree with you. I don’t know what’s holding me back, but I know I’m taking action daily. I’ve stopped checking emails 50 times a day. I think what it is, is I don’t know how to ask for what I want. I’m at the point where it’s time ask people to join my coaching program, but I’d rather write than ask.
Great video. Great post!
Tammy
I started a business and failed. (In fact, my guest post today on Stacy’s blog is about that experience)
It took some time to rebuild and repair after that experience, but I gained insight, maturity and deeper determination that I didn’t have before.
Now, I”m starting again (in a different field) and I am excited for the journey.
Excellent perspective, Steve. Thank you for sharing it. We can gain so many positive things from those types of experiences. Off to read that guest blog post. :)
Growing a business takes work, yet we can make it easy by not putting so much pressure on ourselves to ‘get it right.’ Like any journey, there will be roadblocks and speed bumps but there are also a lot of scenic spots along the way. And like taking a road trip, we wouldn’t just stop midway. We anticipate where we are going and look forward to the destination….what an adventure! Thanks Michele.
Oh man is that ever true, Julie. I used to be terrible about wanting everything to be just perfect before I’d put it out there, and truthfully I got very little done. Now I’ve accepted that I’m going to mess up once in a while, have things go wrong now and then, but that the key is just to go for it, fix whatever needs fixed along the way, and to keep going.
Hi Michelle, as always a great post. As I am new to building my business, the biggest challenge I see is to keep on going even though the results are not seen yet. I wrote a post about this a few weeks ago and how we want results yesterday! We need to be consistent and persistent. I am giving myself time to see the results and in the meantime, I also celebrate the smaller wins such as the number of traffic to my site and the drop in Alexa rankings.
Another challenge is understanding how all the pieces come together and it takes time to figure out what works best for you.
I think the biggest challenge for me is hanging in there while waiting for success to happen. I get bored or impatient or anxious and then, the potential for self-sabotage begins. So I’m finding that there’s a lot of self-parenting involved!
Hello, friends.
This post and discussion is so timely for me. I’m “going through it” this week. First I felt physically exhausted. I wasn’t taking care of myself because I was thinking, “If I just put in one more hour, I’m closer to achieving my goal.” It was a kind of impatience….and not my best strategy. Next I felt emotionally charged up and looking for someone (anyone LOL) to blame: “If only I hadn’t listened to So and So #1, or So and So #2….” I nipped that one in the bud! Now it’s just me and my computer and the friends I’ve found whose words ring true in my heart–and in my mind. I know who you are and it’s refreshing to drop in here and chat with you. Now, I’m going back to my plan and back to my work.
Kate