I come from a family of hard workers. On my Dad's side, there are the farmers who survived the dust bowl and the Great Depression. They rose every day at 5 a.m. and worked until dark. On my mom's side are the Russian and Polish immigrants who arrived in this country penniless and persecuted, using hard work, street smarts, and determination to open and run successful businesses in Brooklyn, the Bronx and elsewhere.
My heritage taught me this: The road to success is paved with hard work.
So, during the past 7 months, as I've attempted to launch a blog, I've allowed that to be my mantra. When my eyes burned at 11 p.m., as I stared at the computer screen and attempted to comment on yet another blog in order to drive traffic to my own, I told myself, "I knew this would be hard. It takes hard work to succeed."
When I rose at 3 a.m. or 5 a.m. to write a blog so I would have it out of the way in time to start my official workday (the one that I actually get paid for), I told mysef, "I knew this would be hard."
When I told my daughter, "In a minute..." any number of times when she wanted juice, mommy time, or something else while I was doing something on my computer, I said, "I knew this would be hard. But it's important, so it's okay."
But it wasn't okay.
For one, my health was suffering. I was developing an overuse injury in my back and butt from sitting in my desk chair so much. I was missing out on the joys of motherhood. My term of endearment for my 4-year-old is, "Bacon Monster," because she loves bacon. Her term of endearment for me was, "Computer Monster."
I was out of balance, and it wasn't okay.
So, in the past few weeks, I've done an about face. I've changed my mantra from "the road to success is paved with hard work," to this: "The road to success is long and difficult, but if I pace myself and stay balanced, I will enjoy the journey."
I've stopped focusing on the finish and, in so doing, I've learned a few important lessons:
Lesson 1: I don't need to drive traffic to my site. I don't need to comment on other sites. I don't need to turn my life upside down in order to get some publicity. I don't need to check Google Analytics several times a day or even once a day. (More on this in another blog). All I need to do is one thing: write quality content on my blog. As long as I do that one thing, the success will come. It might not come as quickly as it would if I did everything else, but it will come.
Lesson 2: I don't need to blog every day. I had been blogging 5 times a week because I read somewhere that daily blogging was essential. Then, in early February, I went on vacation. I took two weeks off from blogging. When I returned, I found that my traffic stats at Project Happily Ever After had not gone down. They'd gone up.
Lesson 3: I don't have to do a great job at everything I do. If I had more time and energy, I'd be doing a lot more with the Premium Bloggers Support Group. If I had more creative energy, I would have blogged at Savor the Success more than once during the past few weeks. In the end, I can't be great at everything, but I can be great at two things: the writing I get paid to write and my Project Happily Ever After blog.
Lesson 4: I will never be able to get as much done in any given day as I wish I could have gotten done. I seem to have a genetic defect that causes me to be an overly optimistic To-Do List Writer. Until recently, my typical To Do List would have 20 or more items on it. Worse, I somehow actually thought I could accomplish all of them in just one day. At the end of each day, when there were five or more items undone, I'd feel like a failure.
Now, I cap my to-do lists at THREE items. Often, two of them are the same every single day: 1) Write Project Happily Ever After Blog 2) Work on heart book (my current paying project). The third item changes from day to day, but it's usually something that will move my blogging career forward. It might be writing a guest blog on another site, working on my memoir book proposal, writing a blog here at STS, or something else.
Then, if I finish my three items and still have time left in my workday, I give myself a choice: do some social networking, tackle a small item in my High Priority Folder, or blow off the rest of the day. Really. I occasionally call it quits at 3:30 p.m. It doesn't happen every day, but it happens, and I don't feel the least bit guilty!
My THREE THINGS RULE not only keeps me sane, it keeps me focused. I feel like a success every day. Every day I take one more step toward my goal. Every day I do the work I'm getting paid to do. Every day I have time to myself, to relax, to exercise, to vegetate. Every day I have time to spend with my husband and daughter.
I'm balanced, and I know this is true because the other day I asked my daughter, "What kind of a monster is Mommy?" She thought for a moment and said, "You're a Tea Monster! You drink a lot of tea!"
I smiled because I knew she would have only said that if I'd been paying attention to her instead of to my computer during the evenings and weekends when she's not at school. And that made me feel successful, too.
How do you balance your drive to reach a goal with your need to stay sane and balanced? Leave a comment.
Alisa Bowman offers marriage help and advice at Project Happily Ever After. If you liked this blog, she thinks you'll love Sometimes It's Better to Be a Quitter.
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