A Few Thoughts About Hopes, Dreams, Starting and Abandoning Projects (Long!)

In my 60-odd years of wandering through life, I have noticed that a lot of people are very good at "starting great projects" and then abandoning them again very quickly, even though they were full of promise and had every appearance of something that could become very successful.

What brought this to mind was my trying to visit a few favorite blogs (not on Steemit) this morning, along with a couple of Facebook pages I had previously been happy to discover. I'd liked them enough that I had linked to them from some of my external blogs, which I have recently been doing some "spring housecleaning" on.

More than a few of them were clearly "not active" anymore. They were sitting there, but it was obvious nobody was keeping them current. A couple were outright gone.

The common thread seemed to be that someone had a great idea, started doing whatever it was they had in mind with lots of enthusiasm... and then abandoned the project because (I'm guessing) "it wasn't a HUGE success" in a matter of a few weeks or months.

Impatience is a Road to Nowhere

With the exception of a few people who just "got lucky" — perhaps because they really did have some truly novel idea that "went viral" — my experience has been that very few projects/blogs/ideas succeed except through lots of dedication, hard work and a "long term horizon" to work towards.

The second part of my experience — mostly gained during my years as a solopreneur consultant — suggests that a large number of people have conceptually "successful ideas" but end up failing because they abandon their ideas many months or even years before they could actually have become very successful.

Last — but certainly not least — a lot of people seem to have completely unrealistic expectations about "how much work" it is to create and maintain something successful.

Impatience in The Age of the Internet

This "start and premature abandon" cycle seems to have become especially common here in "The Age of the Internet" where people seem to have developed these unhealthy expectations that they are going to become "overnight successes." Meanwhile — also because of the Internet — it has become much easier to start new ventures.

To be perfectly honest, many those overnight hits are not the result of "creating success," they are a form of "winning the lottery."

Even back in the pre-Internet days, I remember starting my own business... and my business partners were ready to back out because we weren't making enough money to buy a new Mercedes after a less than a year. And, in fact, they ended up "abandoning" their parts of the business... either selling it back to me, or simply walking away... long before the business actually became quite successful... four years after it had been started. That business ended up lasting 13 years!

I suppose my rules regarding how to create a solid business are rather cynical, but they are based in reality as it actually tends to manifest, rather than "wishes, hopes and dreams." Sadly, most people don't want "reality" because it tends to be more work than most are willing to consider.

Most Ideas CAN Succeed!

On a more positive note, I believe that pretty much anyone can "build success" with a fundamentally sound idea, whether it's a web site, a brick-and-mortar business, a product they make or even just building a fan page on Facebook or a following on Steemit. Included in that, I'll add "becoming a successful writer online."

But what is almost a certainty — except maybe 1% of the time — is that it will take more work, and more time, and cost more money than you originally expected, to get there.

I know. I know. You "had a friend who started blah, blah, blah and it only took six weeks for him or her to make all this money!" Absolutely. 100% true. Odds are that you also had 17 friends who "tried to start something" and failed miserably. We tend to only see the world in terms of the handful of exceptional people who "become Microsoft or Facebook" while conveniently forgetting about the MILLIONS and MILLIONS who started things and almost immediately became disillusioned and gave up.

Keep in mind that, as often as not, what lies behind something that seems like "a great idea" is not so much the idea itself, as being someone with the willingness and determination to make the idea into a success.

Advice? Don't abandon your ideas and dreams just because they "don't come easy!"

This is my 1,346th post on Steemit, after more than 4 years. And I am still building!

Thanks for reading, and have a great rest of your week!

How about YOU? Have you noticed any great ideas or wonderful web sites that seemed to be off to an exciting start, and then suddenly died? Have YOU started any projects, only to abandon them because it was slower/more work than you thought it would be? Has the instant nature of the web made people more impatient? Give me a shout back... Because — after all — SOCIAL content is about interacting, right? Leave a comment — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — NOT A CROSSPOST!!!)
Created at 20210302 23:14 PST
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