Time to get real: this isn’t easy.
Being an entrepreneur is hard. Having a business is hard. Staying confident and committed and excited is hard.
It’s hard.
Yesterday I thought to myself, “What would make this whole thing easier?” And the true answer I gave to myself was, “Just stop.”
Because as long as I keep moving forward and start mastering something, there are new challenges that come up.
For instance: When I first got into blogging, my main question was, “What am I going to blog about?”
Then, as my audience grew a bit, my question became, “How am I going to optimize my blog posts??”
And now it’s all, “How am I going to convert my web traffic?”
The way I’ve approached building this business is one layer at a time. So it seems that as soon as I master something, I add another layer of complication to it.
The reality of having a business is that I am never done learning. Because when my ultimate goal is to create the best product available for my audience, I’m going to have to keep constantly evolving.
Constantly.
So as things seemingly “get better” for my business, they don’t necessarily ever get easier.
But I’m not sure “easy” is what I’m really looking for. I’m starting to realize that what I consider “growing my business” will probably never end. And I am sure there is a buttload of work for me to do next week that I haven’t even thought of yet — because it is so far off my radar that it doesn’t even exist for me yet.
So what do I do when I’m feeling overwhelmed and feel like the work will never end?
I’m a pretty visual person, so I like to use this otherwise pretty useless website called “The Wayback Machine”. Basically, it shows what your website looked like at different times of its lifetime. I can go back to the beginning and basically laugh at myself at how awful my website was. Silly, but it actually works and I become more energized and encouraged that I am making progress towards my goals.
Try typing in your competitors’ sites as well — and laugh at them a little bit, too! Everyone starts somewhere, and it’s encouraging to see that they were once in your same small-biz shoes.
When I look at where some of my websites were even just a year ago, I realize that everything I see on the page from back then WAS HARD to me at the time. But now, I consider so many of those things second nature. I’ve learned and I’ve grown up and my style has been perfected a little more. I can do things more quickly. But I also have filled that “time saved” with new, complicated tasks to learn.
The reality is that “easy” probably isn’t your reality if you want to continue to grow your business. Because the “easy” thing to do is to just quit. Keeping a business afloat is the hard choice, and it will probably always be hard. Because the more you work, the more work there is to do.
Can anyone else relate to this sentiment?