Hands-down Perseverance and Consistency!

When I first quit my job to start my own business, I loved it. I would wake up in the morning without an alarm clock and work on what I felt like. Some days it was writing a blog post, some days it was researching ideas, developing marketing strategies and business models. No day was the same and I loved having the freedom to work on whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. But things changed quickly. The more I had refined my business idea and understood the key factors in the industry, the more my days started to feel like “work” again.

Instead of working on what I feel like every day, I now have optimised and standardised processes with clear goals I follow every week. I put out 3 articles every single week. I send out my newsletter every single week. I do manual, tedious things to grow my email list and “hack” the growth of my business. And I know that this is exactly is driving my success.

But there is so many days where I felt like quitting. Where I felt like it all is for nothing. Because you don’t see the effects of your work right away. It takes time. It takes time to compound your effort. And it is so easy to quit.

There is so many times where I have developed a new strategy, for example a new marketing strategy. The best strategies are hard to execute. And you could give up at any point, just because you FEEL like it is not working. But then I had to remind myself: I have to keep going until I have REAL proof that something is not working. I am not saying you should stubbornly stick with your strategies no matter what. I am just saying: Before you start with a project, decide how you will measure its success. If it is a new marketing strategy, it might be looking at the Cost per Acquisition or Cost per Click. And how much data you need to collect in order to be able to actually TELL whether it is successful or not. Spending 20 Dollars on a marketing campaign that reached 5 people is not good enough to quit and go with a different strategy. Writing one blog article on Medium and not getting any claps is not an indicator that it is NOT working.