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Hi Tamarra,
A friend of mine recently told me about a conference she had attended, one for a very popular business coach who actively advises her attendees that they should only be working 20 hours a week.
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m all for learning how to work more efficiently. I’m a huge proponent of focusing your time on the activities that will make the biggest impact while cutting out the rest, and I don’t think working 80 hours a week for years on end is a healthy way to live.
But I also know that there aren’t really any shortcuts to success.
Granted, there are always exceptions to the rule, but I can say without a doubt that the most successful bloggers and entrepreneurs I know didn’t start out by working 20 hours a week. Instead, they lived and breathed their businesses. They wanted it BAD, and they were willing to do whatever it took, to work as hard and as long as they had to.
And while many of them have now since been able to cut back on their work hours and reintroduce a sense of balance in their lives, that balance is only possible because of the momentum they built from those early years of hustle. Even the guru leading this conference admitted that she had worked crazy hours for ten years before deciding to simplify and cut back.
At Elite Blog Academy, we frequently talk about the four phases of growing a successful, profitable blog—refining your message, growing your audience, monetizing your platform, and building your business—but I think that in any form of entrepreneurship or growing a business, there are a few very distinct stages as well, stages that correspond with the phases of EBA.
First, there’s the “Who Am I?” stage, which is similar to the “Refine Your Message” portion of EBA, where you begin to figure out what your business is about, and what you have to offer your potential customers. And while some entrepreneurs try to skip this phase, I do believe—just like in EBA—that the more work you put in during this phase, the easier time you will have later on.
Next, there’s the “Throwing Spaghetti” stage, where you just keep trying new things to see what will stick. This is an exciting time, but it is also an exhausting time, the period where you might be working crazy hours as you try to figure out what works and what doesn’t, the period where you take some risks, some of which will pan out, and some of which won’t.
And as exhausting as it may be, this stage is critically important to growing a successful business. It is where all the research happens, the place where you figure out, through trial and error, where you want to go. In EBA, this phase happens during modules 2 and 3, where we are figuring out how to grow our audience and then how to monetize.
And finally, there’s the “Hone and Refine” stage, where you begin to focus only on those things that are working, and cut out the rest. In EBA, we call this the Build Your Business phase, and while it is a great place to be, there is a whole lot of work that goes in to getting here.
I think sometimes in blogging—and in business—we often want to find a shortcut to success, but the reality is that every stage is an important part of the process.
By the way, I’d love to hear what stage you are at right now, and what you’re working on. Shoot me an email and let me know!
That’s it for now—have a great week!
xoxo, Ruth
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