Publish365 013: Start Small
One of the most common excuses people tell me when asked why they don't start a side hustle of some kind to make some extra income (or, in the same vein, take on a large project) is something akin to there not being a guarantee of success. If the road isn't clearly defined, some people simply won't travel down it. "I want to replace my income or it's not worth it," they'll say, as they sit on the couch doing nothing and moving nowhere because they can't jump right into income replacement.
The problem is one of perspective, not one of motivation.
If someone tasks you with moving a rock 100 miles, how would you approach it? Would you just say, "I can't do that all at once, so I won't do it at all?" or would you say "I can move the rock 1 mile a day and it'll take this long. Let me get started?"
Life is often a slow burn. Rarely do you enter a project or business at the "goal," but you work toward it. If you want to start a money-producing side hustle, you first have to figure out what that side hustle is and start doing it so that you get good enough at it that people will pay you for it. If you want to take on a huge project in your workshop, you don't just build the whole project, you build it in parts. Everything is done by achieving progress a little at a time, then combining it and building upon it.
When I started woodworking in 2017, I had no idea what was going to come from it. I didn't expect to be making things for other people, and yet here I am 4 years later. Go back to me then, and tell me then that I would be starting a woodworking business, and I would have laughed at you. "That's too much. Too big. Too many moving parts. I don't even have tools." Well, here I am working daily on customer orders in one form or another and happy to be delivering little chunks of happiness to people on a regular basis.
Should I not have started this because I'm not making $100k a year? When you say it that way does it even make sense?
There's an old riddle: "How do you eat an elephant," the answer to which is "One bite at a time." Taking one bite at a time of a thing is the only way to do it that makes sense, even if the bites are small. In this morning Jason Stapleton's email said this:
"For example, had I know how difficult it would be to start my first business I might never have attempted it.
It was my total ignorance of the work involved that allowed me to take the first step...and then the second."
You can't take the second step until you take the first. That's just the way things are in this regard: sequential. Your goal after reading this should be figuring out what that first step is and taking it. Now.
If you enjoy the stuff I'm writing here, I'd love it if you'd join my mailing list! Just go to the contact page and send me a message and by doing so you'll be added to my email list. I send about one email a week and coming in 2021 there will be special mailing-list-only exclusives like early sales and discounts. This is going to be the best email you get; trust me.