Day 69: On Climbing Steep Hills
To climb steep hills
Requires slow pace at first.
If you think of your goal as a steep hill, imagine how ridiculous it would be to stop midway just because you’re slowly scrambling up instead of sprinting all the way to the top. That’s precisely what many people do when they start working on a new goal and realize that the journey will take longer than they expected.
What difference does it make that reaching a goal takes you longer than you planned? If you want to climb a steep hill, will you stop climbing it because you can’t climb it in two hours, but can in three? Will you retreat to the bottom of the hill and forever stare at its peak, frustrated by the dissatisfying pace of the climb?
Another mistake is the assumption that if something is slow in the beginning, it will stay that way.
When I started my career as a self-published author, I tried several different genres. Things were going slow at the beginning because I needed to figure out which genre and style fitted me best. Once I established the proper direction, I released my first bestseller, then the second, and soon there was a snowball effect. How wise would it have been to give up during the first several months, frustrated by the slow pace?