I've been working on a project lately that has been quite challenging and exhausting. Being self employed, it's always important to secure continuous revenue streams. As with all businesses, there are no guaranteed revenue streams.

What I've found is that more always wants more. Success always wants more success. Everytime I've succeeded at a goal, I've always told myself, I will sit and enjoy this feeling of accomplishment for a while. It always seems that there are external requirements that keep asking for more. ie... other people see that you're successful with something and want you to help them out.

Conversely, if your business has slowed down sales wise, and you're having to cut back, you have to scale down in all respects to accomodate the slow down.

So... You're either going to be in a state of growth or decline. You're either going up, or you're going down. That means you can plateau for a short time before you go up or down. Plateauing, or enjoying what you've got, only lasts a short time.

Here's the part I've learned over the years. No matter what state you are in your life, you're either going up or down with things in your life or your career. You're going to have to face decline or incline even if you're exhausted, stressed out, unhappy, excited, happy, or energized.

I will always remember the time when I had worked several months to get a project off the ground. I was completely exhausted and was suffering from burn out. I worked seven days a week to get the project going and successful.

All of a sudden the project took off and the business started to be wildly successful. All of a sudden I went from exhausted to way past exhausted trying keep up with the successful business.

People around me were wondering why I wasn't ecstatic about the new business success. I was ecstatic, however I was completely exhausted.

Here's what I learned. I still practice this today. Just keep showing up!

If you're working on a project and for whatever reason you don't want to be there, it's really important to keep showing up each day. That's usually the difference between failure and success. People usually fail because they lose interest and stop showing up for the job or project.

I find that even if I show up and do five minutes of work, because that's all I can manage mentally or physically, it's better to do that then to quit the project. The next day will be better.

This is what I've been doing in the last few weeks. I've been working to get my business off of the plateau and moving it in the upward direction. Overcoming the inertia to get off the ground takes a huge amount of work. The good news is that my efforts are paying off and things are starting to move forward.

By Monty Loree - Financial Maturity blog - Topic - maturity of success - just show up.

Articles from October 2005
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