Avoid The Deadly Mistake: Sticking To A Plan
Published on Jan 16, 2008 in featured, goals, motivation, selfimprovement
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One problem that many self-employed people face is the inability to stick with one linear plan and follow it through until the end. It is very easy to get sidetracked by ideas that you think might be better or easier than the plan you are currently working on. You may also get bored with your current plan, and you may decide you want to pursue something else. It’s a trap! Don’t fall for it!
Even if your current plan turns out to be unprofitable in the end, you won’t know until you finish it. If you keep switching paths in the middle of a project, you will never get anything done. And when you never finish anything, it’s very hard to make any money!
One of the secrets of successful business people is making plans and sticking to them. Not all of your plans are likely to work as well as you hope they will, but the important thing is seeing each project through to the end and testing the results. Once you have a successful project completed, you can take the success of that project and use it as the framework for your next project, which will give you a much greater chance of succeeding with your new project.
The following story may sound at least vaguely familiar to you if you are the type of person that has trouble sticking to one plan until it is completed.
Sue decides she wants to start a self-publishing business and sell her books on eBay. She decides to write her first book about a diet that her co-worker lost 50 pounds on recently, called the apple diet. Sue manages to write two full chapters, and while she is writing chapter three, she sees a news story on television that says the once-popular apple diet is declining in popularity and the new diet craze is the pumpkin diet. Sue fails to take into consideration that while the apple diet is indeed declining in popularity, there are still several hundred thousand people still attempting this diet, and its popularity has only dropped by about 25% in the last year. She immediately scraps the apple diet book and begins writing a book about the pumpkin diet.
After Sue has written a couple of chapters on her pumpkin diet book, her friend tells her that she heard that books don’t sell on eBay anymore, and that t-shirts are selling like crazy there. So Sue decides to give up her idea of self-publishing altogether, and she goes to a popular t-shirt selling website and starts learning how to create her own t-shirts. She submits one shirt design to the site and puts it up for auction on eBay. Unfortunately, her “Honk if you love olives” idea does not sell, and she decides that t-shirts really don’t sell on eBay and she decides to look for something else, completely neglecting to even revisit her other two projects that she had already put several hours into.
Someone like Sue is going to have a very difficult time ever making a real success of anything, because she gets distracted too easily by new ideas, thus abandoning old ideas entirely. She also got extremely disheartened because her one try at making a t-shirt did not sell, so she didn’t even try any other slogans or designs.
Don’t let this happen to you. Even if you think another project is a better idea, finish the one you are currently working on first! At least then maybe your first project can be bringing in some money while you work on your “next big thing.”
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I went through something like this. As a developer I was writting websites vs. books but the story is the same. To get it out of my system I spent a year doing 1-a-months. A new site a month for a year until my list was empty. As fast and cheap as possible. It helped in many ways:
1. I cleared my list so I wasnt distracted.
2. Taught me the value of user feedback, I only made changes when users asked for them.
3. Showed me what to improve on, I noticed common deficiencies across my sites and worked on them.
4. Taught me that the idea is only as good as ability to market it.
5. Showed me that time is not as critical as I though.
What stuck with me is that some of the sites stagnated no matter how much I publicized them while other grew even if I didnt touch them for a few months.
I’m different now then before my 1-a-months.
Paul | Jan 16, 2008 | Reply
Thank You for your comment Paul
Better Life | Jan 19, 2008 | Reply