Last week on the podcast I interviewed Joanna Penn from The Creative Penn. If you haven’t heard the interview you can listen to it here.
One of the things that I found most interesting about Joanna’s story is that she never had a big breakout hit. Instead she was able to build a six-figure business slowly overtime. She consistently sat down and did the work required. Her small successes stacked themselves one on top of the other until she got to where she is today.
Her story isn’t really that special. She’s one of many who have set out to slowly build a career doing what she loves. It’s like building a house. It doesn’t happen all at once. First you make the plans. Then you lay the foundation. Then you build the walls. It’s all bare bones at first, but eventually you’ll fill it out.
There are steps that you take in a certain order. If you started out by making the roof you’d have a difficult time constructing the rest of the house, but sometimes that’s what we want to do with our dreams. We see the surface. We see what someone else has built and we try to emulate that. We start out with the siding and forget about the blueprints and the foundation.
We try to capture that shiny sparkly thing they have in only a few weeks without ever considering that they took years to get there. Then we get frustrated when we don’t see success as quickly as we hoped. We want to quit when something goes wrong. We try to rush everything and the house starts toppling down around us. Then we sit and feel sorry for ourselves. We think things like, “Why me?” or “I must just be unlucky,” or “Dreams weren’t meant for someone like me.”
But, we weren’t there for the beginning, so we don’t know about their struggles. Maybe they found themselves in a house that was crashing down around them too, but they didn’t give up. They found a way to reconstruct it instead. We don’t know about the tedium they endured doing the same thing day after day for years with little reward to get to the point that they are today. We didn’t see them when they had no customers, when they were broke. We weren’t there on the days they thought about quitting. We weren’t there for that so we don’t know about it. All we know is the end result. All we see is what looks to us to be an overnight success.
Well there are no overnight successes really. There is the ten year overnight success that looks like overnight to us because we weren’t there. There are the people who have labored away unnoticed for years at there passion mastering and perfecting it until one day someone … many finally noticed. Then there are the people who labored away at there passion slowly building a business that will sustain them over time.
On this blog I talk a lot about following your dreams, pursuing your passions, and developing your talents. I think that these pursuits are noble, but they are not easy. Doing what you are most passionate about for a living can be hard. Following your dreams won’t be the easy road.
You must be willing to go against what society tells you is safe and expected. Frankly, society is right about these pursuits being unstable. This life is not for the faint of heart. It is not for someone who can’t take a certain amount of uncertainty. You must be willing to push yourself. You must have discipline and courage. You must have faith that you can make it. You must be able to fight through your fears. It isn’t for everyone. Most people would rather have the comfort now than push forward into their dreams.
For some making their talents and passions their careers causes the passion to dry up. The daily grind of pursuing a creative interest for money wrings the creativity from them like a sponge.
You might be thinking, but Lovelyn, you’re usually so positive, why are you telling me this? I am usually positive, but I’m also practical and realistic. I believe that we are all serving the world at our highest level when we are pursuing our dreams, but I also believe that not everyone is cut out for such a pursuit. So before you start on this path carefully examine your life and decide whether it is really right for you.
Once you decide to move forward commit to be all in the pursuit. Align yourself with others who are doing the same because when times get tough you can support each other.
There will be twists and turns and stops and starts. It will be a bumpy ride, but it will be the ride of a lifetime.