Want To Be a Rockstar Entrepreneur? Do The Work!

How’s January coming together for you so far?

I must admit that I’ve sometimes struggled after almost a month long break to turn up and do the work.

I got a kick in the pants the other day, however, from reading a great post on Medium from Gary Vaynerchuk.

(Actually ended up having a fabulous conversation online with Ben Lumley as a result of sharing it. We riffed off of the content for a while and I think were both a little star struck when Gary actually joined in!

But I digress!)

Anyway, the post calls out the get famous quick brigade who imagine it should somehow be easy to walk into one kind of business success or another. It caught my attention because I come across this kind of thing in my practice from time to time. People turn up and expect that, because they’ve decided they’re going to start a new gig, the business will start rolling in immediately.

Hell, I can myself see shiny new ventures and get frustrated when they turn out to be more difficult to get results from than I imagined.

I think our culture has, with all its social media and X Factor mentality, given us the illusion that overnight success is possible. It’s easy enough to get some glamorous Internet-worthy photos of yourself done, and to hire a copywriter to put some smart spin on what you do. It’s much, much more difficult to have deep content behind the image.

And it’s the deep content that does the heavy lifting.

Sustainable success has three key ingredients:

Turn up

Take a blue collar approach to whatever you’ve chosen to do and graft a little. Think of yourself as an apprentice. You’re no master at anything until you’ve put some hours, weeks, months – years even – into whatever it is you’re trying to get under your belt.

Put in the time.

Fail

That’s right. Fuck up big time.

Make epic mistakes.

You may lose a lot of money, and piss people off. You may make yourself very uncomfortable. But you’ll be right there on your learning edge.

Every psychological rip and tear is how, when things settle, your muscle for whatever venture you’re intent on cracking strengthens your muscle for it.

Repeat

Take whatever you learn and put it back into whatever you’re doing.

How does it inform things? What will you do next? And next again after that?

The folks in my practice who see the biggest gains are those who totally commit to doing the work. They obsess about whatever it is they want to achieve. They read everything they can about it and more besides.

They treat their business like they were athletes. They know they won’t get the Gold unless they’re in great form.

They risk looking like fools a lot of the time but they know that the more they go out of their comfort zones and the more conversation we have around it, the further they take themselves in their personal development, which of course has a direct impact on their business results.

Does that mean it’s easy? Hell, no.

Is it worth it? Hell, yeah.