#work #business #productivity #entrepreneurship #leadership

Success Comes Only to Those Who Persevere

During the initial phase, an insane amount of work may produce no tangible results

Life is as stubborn as a mule if you wish to change its direction. It resists change — it likes stability.

You must have experienced a feeling of resistance when you wanted to do something but your inner self refused to act. It is called psychological inertia, and it is related to your mind’s unwillingness to change.

This psychological inertia implies that if you were doing something, you would like to continue it. For example, if you have a job, you’d likely continue it for a long time even after you have decided to quit. This inertia also means that if you did not have a job for some time, you would require a lot of willpower to push yourself in the morning to go to the office. Your inner self may even resist to go for an interview. This is also related to our status quo bias.

William Samuelson, a Boston University Professor, and Richard Zeckhauser, a Harvard Professor, say that status quo bias stems from a fear of probable loss. We would be unwilling to risk a new venture if we had a bad experience in the past, or if we are afraid that we might regret changing our position.

When you start doing something new, it is hard to understand what you are doing at the beginning. You may have some idea about why you started doing it, but you’d not know the barriers to entry in that field or the tricks of trade necessary to master your new work. Nobody understands everything in the beginning. Mastery always takes some time.

During this initial phase, you’d be making honest mistakes, or even blunders at times, to get the work done. Your work may feel unnerving, especially if you are doing something creative, and you are not familiar with the best practices of the craft. Think about amazing YouTube videos or blog posts by other writers on the internet — and how you have no idea about what happened behind the scenes to make all that possible.

Your brain, during these initial days, is working even more when you are resting or sleeping. Your sleep hours consolidate what you have learned during the day. Your mind tries to come up with unique perspectives and solutions that will give you the edge to rise above your competition.

Since you are learning, your initial work will look like amateur work. You’d probably not be liked by your viewers or readers as much as some other people who had started a decade ago. The veterans are not in the initial phase, they overcame this initial disappointment a long time ago, and they don’t make rookie mistakes anymore.

During this phase, you may ruin a lot of your work owing to minor mistakes and lack of knowledge about the subtle points or tricks of the trade. Nobody may like the result of all your efforts and hard work. You must understand that it is the initial phase, and you may be climbing a steep learning curve for entry into the professional mode.

Most of the people — your potential competition — will quit during this phase. Your real competitors are only the people who are not leaving the field even after nobody likes their work. The quitters might not be as much in love with their work as you are. The liking you show to your chosen field of work and the joy you feel — despite failing to create a masterpiece at this time — may be responsible for your future success.

When you make near-miss mistakes, you are learning fast. You would notice finer points that others may fail to see. Your love and sincere wish to succeed will help you to try again and again until you will succeed in creating acceptable specimens of your work.

One of the main hurdles in your path, during this initial phase, would be the ugly self-doubt. You would start doubting yourself without an apparent reason. You would think about things like — how can I do this? It is very hard. Do I have that kind of ability? I am just wasting my time. Nobody wants to see or read my work. I should do something that helps me pay the bills, and a million other expressions like that. But this is not just you who is questioning yourself. It is because you can see the progress others are making and the quality of their work. Your family is criticizing you about your new line of work — it can create a self-doubting stream of thoughts. But remember that these problems are an essential part of the initial phase, and this is what makes so many people quit. Everybody goes through it, and you are not the first one to experience such powerful opposing forces.

Whenever you think of quitting, whenever the initial phase slows down your efforts, you’ll have to consciously redouble your efforts to reach a point where you can feel that your work is starting to move in the right direction.

When your work is in motion, you’ll see yourself making fewer mistakes as you move towards your goals. You’d have learned a lot of details, little tricks of the trade, and long term strategies to save yourself from wasting your time. You’d notice that your doubts have lost their sting, though they would always be there to strike again if you ever slowed down or encountered a rough patch in your productivity and creativity.

The optimal stage, when you reach it, would imply that your work will push you to perform better. You’ll wake up automatically, and you’ll feel fresh and willing to work. You’ll have ready answers for self-doubts and witty responses to other people’s comments. Your mind will be brimming with brilliant workable ideas that will inspire you all the time, and you’ll have only a faint recollection of the time when you were a rookie and wasted so much time, energy, and emotions making stupid mistakes.