This week’s question from “Ask Us Anything” comes from someone who wishes to remain anonymous.
How do you know you’re working too hard?…and you’re being like a fly banging its head against the window—when it could just turn 180 degrees, and fly out the open door?
How do you know when you’re making it hard on yourself, and you’re NOT working smarter?
When you’re not getting the result.
This becomes identifiable through results.
Hard work isn’t a bad thing—it’s a good thing. I like to think of it in terms of being “diligent,” not in terms of, “Oh my God, this is so hard.”
Why? Because the brain operates on the commands you give to it.
You could be doing something you think is hard. But if you start telling yourself it’s easy, your brain will make it easy.
Our brain is absolutely astounding in the way it can do that.
So, if you’re looking at a result and you’re not getting the result you want, you have to ask yourself:
“Why am I not getting this result? What is the problem? Based on cause and effect, why am I not getting this result?”
If you don’t know, you might have to ask somebody. You may need to ask for help.
You have to find out why you’re not getting that result. One of the reasons could be that you’re making it too hard.
Also, consider the Law of Gender. Whenever you’re working towards achieving a certain outcome, you have to put a level of effort towards it—and then there’s a gestation period.
Some things require an incredible amount of persistence, time, and effort in order to accomplish those things. It depends on what it is and how you’re going about it.
In business, you might spend a lot of time cultivating clients. Some clients, you might get right away. Some clients, you might work on for years to try to get them to work with you.
You can’t work any harder to do that. You just have to be persistent. You have to find out what they want. You have to stay in front of them until the time is right for them to buy.
Persistence has its own momentum.
If you’re persistent—if you’re consistently going after the clients you want to work with—there should be no reason to not gain their business.
…Unless you find out that you don’t want to work with them, that you don’t want to continue going after them (however long it takes to get them). You may have to reach out every few months.
The idea is to keep putting yourself in front of those people over and over and over again.
Eventually, when the time is right, they’ll have seen you so much that they’ll give you a shot. That’s just the way it works.
But most people don’t do that. They don’t have the persistence.
