Being Ok With Being Small Is The Key To Making It Big
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were the monuments you gaze at in awe, so why should you?
I want to do something amazing by the time I die. So do you.
I want to be remembered as someone who changed the world in a good way. I would think you do too.
Pretty bodacious goals, right? It might scare some people, I have grown to say, bring it on!
Patience is very underrated.
Look at me. I was so pulled in by the ‘write and make money’ slogan most of us run by, that I begged for followers my first 2 months on Medium.
No worries! We live and learn.
How did that go, you might ask?
Nature has a way of slapping you across the face when you try and cheat it. No question about it.
Here is how I was slapped,
I crossed the threshold of 100 followers within 2 weeks. I looked up to sign up for the Partner Program. Lo and behold, my country was not in the listed ones.
Optimism turned into pessimism. I was devastated.
Nature also has a way to sometimes forgive you too.
The thing is, I did want to make money but I also enjoyed writing. I wanted to write.
The following days had me wanting to write like never before. Since then, I can genuinely say, the love only grew.
When I had made a commitment to write daily, I checked back on the Partner Program for whatever reason, turns out my country WAS listed in it and I had misread it.
Pretty stupid of me, but nothing I regret.
‘Journey of a 1000 miles begins with a single step’
Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither were the monuments you gaze at in awe, so why should you?
Sometimes it is hard to start. In other cases, you start with wild expectations completely forgetting the amount of work required to get to where you want to.
When we start, we want instant progress to keep going.
Without that instant progress, we feel demotivated.
When I signed up for the Partner Program and saw $0.01 as my earnings, I was demotivated.
At the same time, I read articles about people earning $8000 and up via writing. I felt discouraged.
I gave myself a reality check.
I asked myself,
Do I like to write? Yes
Do I want to get to the top? Yes
Can I be patient with the work I need to do and grateful for my current situation? Yes
That was it.
It is still a long way to go but it doesn’t overwhelm me, it excites me.
I am fairly small right now. Doesn’t mean I always have to be.
Why do people fuss over being small?
I experienced it. I had 50 followers, all of whom I had begged to follow me. At the same time, people had 200,000. I felt unlucky.
Numbers are misleading.
They completely hide the years of work behind them.
Had it said 7 years on their profiles and 6 days on mine, things would be different.
Follower count doesn’t impress me anymore, commitment does.
If you have been doing the same thing for a considerable amount of time, I idolise you. I want to be like you.
So I asked myself, why do people fuss over being small?
I instantly knew the answer because I had been a victim of it.
2 words — Instant Gratification.
We all want to impress the other person. We want to do something that makes the other person go ‘wow’ with the shortest amount of effort.
I still do it. You do too. We all do.
When we see someone go ahead of us in something, it makes us worry.
At the same time, when we surpass someone a bit of arrogance develops, sometimes loads of it. We rub it in because they rubbed it in.
It is important to get past this illusion of competition. We all want different things, what are we competing on?
This was when this sudden illumination occurred for me.
This is what Gary Vee has to say,
Fall in love with patience early on to be fast for the rest of your life
The best advice is the simplest
Stay in your own lane, focus on yourself
I know that if I am focused and patient, I am already ahead of the ones that aren’t. Unfortunately, that is most people.
You don’t NEED to know anything to start a business. Experience is the best teacher.
Continuous learning is a major procrastinator but no learning is an obvious misstep.
What tells you, you are small?
Follower count and story views I figured.
I decided to stop looking at story stats
Part of the reason was I wasn’t doing well.
If my first months' writing did anything, it made me feel okay about losing.
None of my stories gained any traction.
This was important. If the number of people reading my article becomes an issue, I will always look at stats. This will demotivate me, I don’t want that.
All I am now focused on is writing the best article I can write and trying to do that every day. If someone comments, I reply but how many people view it, I am not interested in that anymore.
Yes, I still view it to check how I can improve but if it makes me demotivated I stop doing it.
Nothing shows you you like a mirror
A look in the mirror worked for me so I would urge everyone who reads this to take a long hard look in the mirror. Ask yourself what is it that you want?
Do you genuinely want it, or do you want it because others want it?
What do you want to be remembered as?
Once you know the answer to this, you are set. Let others race away ahead of you, if your focus is you, you have already won!
Don’t prepare for who wins tomorrow.
If you have to lose small battles to win the war it is a fair trade.
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