Time for a mid year review. It’s tempting to make a sweeping statement like ‘no progress’ and quickly hurry on, but if the next six months are to see real improvement I’ll need to come up with something more useful than that.
At one point during the last six months I considered abandoning this blog. It was taking too much of my time. I had realised I needed to get ahead of my posting schedule to free up time for traffic and product creation tasks, but I could not seem to do it on a consistent basis. The blog is established and a hub for what I am trying to build. I decided to persevere, but will review the situation again before Christmas.
February was the tenth anniversary of setting up in business. The web design part has been going well, but the IM side has seen much less progress than I’d hoped. It feels like almost nothing has been achieved in the last 10 years. Of all the projects I’ve started in that decade there are just a couple of pen named ebooks on Clickbank to show for it. Perhaps it’s a reflection of how hard IM is, how difficult it is to get good support and guidance, or if I give in to my darkest thoughts, how lame and incompetent I am at implementing the advice I’ve paid for.
The course I came so close to launching last year is languishing on Amazon S3 and behind a couple of websites. At the moment it’s pretty much abandoned as I’m showing more despondency and caution than courage.
The lesson I’m taking from this is to do lots of testing in small doses instead of investing everything in one large project that has a major impact if something goes wrong.
However I have to move on. See this as a temporary setback, not permanent failure. Make a course correction then adequately resource the amended plan. People in a job will never fail to this extent. But that’s not the only opportunity they miss.
When we are working on a product we look forward to taking the credit, but we should also be prepared to take the blame and ridicule. You need to be on your guard as it is easy to fall into the “Victim Trap” and to blame others, the outside world or outside forces for our own inability to succeed.
We must be strong. It is in failure that we learn and grow most. It is what we do when we fail that matters. We can wallow in self pity and loathing or we can do something about it and take action to improve our lot. It is in the trying that we build character. We must guard against anything diluting our energy for the next project.
So we should embrace our failures, take ownership of them, look at them as a chance to learn so we do not repeat the same mistakes. When we fail, we should Fail Fast and Fail Forward, making a proactive choice to learn from them.
Counting my blessings, I still do not work for a large company or organisation that regards me as a disposable number. I’m not restricted by what I can and cannot do because I have a Boss to answer to. I have a life where I am mostly in charge, no longer reliant, dependent and trapped by a J.O.B. Many would envy me for that foundation. Now it’s about time I restarted building on it.