Real talk for dreamers
Failure is more common than we like to admit. I’m not trying to be discouraging, but that’s how the numbers work out. There is a ton of survivorship bias and stories of overnight successes out there. Pursuing your dream is not a reasonable thing to do. But who says that we ever were reasonable creatures?
In the beginning, you should not ask your dream to house and feed you. You will live off savings, loans, investment, a day job, a supportive partner, credit card debt, and/or family wealth. This will give you the mental freedom to create in peace.
If you’re starting a business, it commonly takes five years to become profitable. This is a long game. Pace yourself.
You have to become consistent in your work. You have to show up regularly. You have to do things even if you don’t want to. You don’t have to show up perfectly. You don’t have to become a robot. But you do have build trust with both yourself and your work.
You will have to network, market, and face rejection after rejection, failure after failure. These are totally learnable skills. 80% of the work here is managing your own experience with discomfort. Building a business means dying a million tiny deaths.
The world works through emergence. You have to repeatedly create without knowing the outcome. An outcome may in several years, or never. This is the opposite of instant gratification.
Some bad productivity habits to drop:
doing high value work when you’re tired
making something but never putting it out in the world
only working on the fun stuff in order to avoid all the hard, cringey stuff
one or the other: always being in your feels at the cost of doing work (maybe it's not that deep), or never thinking about your feelings in order to do work (feelings are normal, and serve as essential clues to the healing and growth we have to do)
In return, regardless if you succeed, you will grow into a deeper, bigger, and more healed version of yourself. This is the ultimate gift you can give yourself.