As you watch the Olympic games in Beijing, something will inspire you. Likely, many courageous, tough, remarkable athletes will inspire you.
Try to take a business lesson away from the Games this time around.
When your favorite athlete or event leaves you with a heart full of pride in the recognition of greatness, dedication, success, and extreme focus and hard work, think about your business and how you can inject the heart these athletes have into it.
How hard would you work on one blog post to make it as good as Michael Phelps’ performance in these Games? Is it even possible?
How many years of hard work, suffering, and lack of sleep would you go through in order to realize your goals? The athletes in the Olympics have spent much of their lives in gyms, pools, and on the field just to prepare themselves for their best performances ever. Usually performances that last mere seconds. Then it’s over. Years of work and single-minded dedication in order to shine for a blip of time and possibly come out as the gold medalist.
Honing your marketing and content development skills to the same level of perfection as an Olympic athlete takes time. It takes laser focus and dedication. And it takes putting up with climbing out of obscurity, little by little, until you are at the top of your game.
Every post you make is a bank deposit to be withdrawn sometime in the future. Every post is one in a line of thousands upon thousands of actions you take to inch toward authority, critical mass, and hyper-popularity in your market.
The rewards are obvious. Money, fame, authority, respect. Yet most people falter. They find the work too hard. They can’t hack it in so many ways for so many reasons that they give up.
The athletes at these Olympic games are the ones who never gave up. They are the rare ones. Successful people are rare in comparison to the rest of the world population which lives an average existence from birth to death.
Your choice is which group you’d prefer to be in…
You’re either going to do whatever it takes to succeed or you’re going to fold back into the masses of average people who take their cues in life from outside influences and live vicariously through the successful, independent people.
The choice seems an easy one. But the path to success is a hard road filled with setbacks, burnouts, long hours, and long periods of no gratification. You’re investing in an outcome that might take months, but probably years, before you taste glory.
Having a top website is nothing in comparison to a gold medal in the Olympics. But the guts, work, and dedication it takes to achieve greatness in your “sport” is much the same.
{ 3 comments… read them below or add one }
“Every post you make is a bank deposit to be withdrawn sometime in the future. Every post is one in a line of thousands upon thousands of actions you take to inch toward authority, critical mass, and hyper-popularity in your market.”
This is a great post Jack. Thanks so much. I really love the way you put it there. It’s encouraging and it also makes me realize how important it is not to skimp on the important things in favor of the easy things … it can be so easy to go off in all directions online, tweaking this and that, commenting here and there … all very important. But then you realize you spent a whole day online and didn’t write a single blog post or original article! It’s not just about working, it’s about sticking to the important work (and not always just the easiest-to-confront work).
Webcam Comment?? What’s this! I’m home with the flu, sorry!
@Anna – Thanks for such a great comment – with the flu no less! Now THAT’s Olympic Commenting!
Very awesome article…. nicely written! You always have great posts..and they’re inspiring to my blogging.