Don’t worry too much. This blog post isn’t meant to be a total downer, I promise. In fact, it could be one of the most uplifting and reassuring things you read this week.
If you’re a regular reader of John Chow dot Com, then you probably aren’t like most people. You probably aren’t all that interested in climbing the corporate ladder or getting some fancy title within some multinational corporation, because you’d much rather be in business for yourself as a professional blogger, Internet marketer, or some sort of other online professional. Good on you!
Think Like a Winner
This also likely means that you have the mindset of an entrepreneur or at least you aspire to have the mindset of the entrepreneur. You want to think like a dot com mogul so that you can become a dot com mogul. And to this end, you probably have some pretty lofty goals for yourself. You likely have a grand vision of how this is all going to pan out, how you’re going to have the fancy house with the fancy car, how you’re going to go on fancy vacations and eat fancy foods. These are all perfectly understandable goals to have.
By the very nature of the entrepreneurial mindset, you’re ambitious. You fully subscribe to the philosophy that you should aim for the stars, because even if you come up short, you could end up on the moon. You set goals and objectives for yourself that, on an intellectual level, you likely recognize are practically unattainable. They’re just out of reach, because you want to push yourself. You want to see how far you can really go.
Because you’re not willing to settle for mediocrity.
Be Exceptional
Set a humble goal and you can only hope to be average. And you have no interest in being average. You have no interest in being normal. You want to live the dot com lifestyle.
However, by setting these big grandiose goals, you’ll inevitably come up short. Even if you can certainly be deemed as successful by purely objective means, you might feel like a failure because you didn’t achieve your big lofty goal. And that’s why you’re probably going to get depressed.
Because, for you, good enough simply is not good enough. You want to be great.
Contrast this to the situation where you set a rather small goal that only pushes you beyond your current position by a little hair. Maybe your goal is to keep your regular 9-to-5, but to also have a blog on the side that merely breaks even. Big deal. How are you going to feel when you “achieve” that goal? Probably not that great. What if your goal is for your blog income to fully replace your day job within the first six months?
You’re probably going to come up short. And that can be terribly depressing.
You’re Not Like Most People
But here’s the thing (and I did promise you a silver lining here). If you are truly destined for great things, if you truly have the mindset of entrepreneur, then you aren’t going to be like most people. Because most people will quit when they aren’t rewarded with the instant gratification of immediate success. You will persevere. You’ll have a stick-to-itness that will see you through the tough times, outlasting the competition who has long since thrown in the towel.
Because successful people are the ones who last. They’re the ones who are knocked down a hundred times, but get up a hundred and one times. We might hear about the “overnight success” of this guy or that, but their success is very rarely “overnight.” It’s after years of anguish and hard work that they emerge.
So yes, coming up short can be depressing. It can even feel devastating. But if you have the courage and dedication to get back up, one more time, the immeasurable rewards are there for the taking. You just have to go grab it.