The Illusion of Immediate Results

“Judging from conversations with retired bloggers, many of the orphans were cast aside by people who had assumed that once they started blogging, the world would beat a path to their digital door.”

“I was always hoping more people would read it, and it would get a lot of comments,” Mrs. Nichols said recently by telephone, sounding a little betrayed. “Every once in a while I would see this thing on TV about some mommy blogger making $4,000 a month, and thought, ‘I would like that.’ ”

So here’s the deal. I think many people stop things in their life for two main reasons. One, because the results don’t line up with their expectations. And secondly, because they’re under the illusion of immediate results. This is the lie that says that if you just make a really small tweak in your behavior or anything else, you’ll experience exponential growth. The people cited in this article thought that once they started blogging they’d see immediate results and would be flooded with people seeing their blog and making comments. When they didn’t see the readers or comments they were hoping for, the wind was taken from their sails.

I think this principle applies to just about everything in life, though: how long you’ll be at that job, how long you’ll keep that gym membership, how long you’ll be blogging or writing, or for how long you may explore a life of spirituality.

So what can you do about it?

• Clarify your purpose in what you’re doing.

I first started a blog about two years ago, but didn’t have a clear purpose for the blog. Was it going to be a personal-journal type blog? Why did I want to have one? I realized that I didn’t have any kind of clear purpose or direction, so I never went past one post on it. It’s since been deleted.

When I began this blog, I sought to clarify why I wanted it. I sought to have really clear expectations about what I wanted to get out of it. After much thinking and processing, I realized that I needed and wanted to start a blog for one main reason: to learn. I needed a vehicle to help me process and better understand things that I’m reading and learning about. And there’s the principle, of course, that if you want to learn something, you teach it to someone else. I wanted to make sure that significant ideas and principles I learn about are not lost because I couldn’t find a venue to teach and process the ideas. So I decided to blog about them. It helps me to learn.

And I’ve never had any kind of metric for how many people I wanted to have reading the blog. I decided from the first day that if no more than a few people read the blog, I was going to be ok with that because my purpose in starting it was not to share my thoughts with the world, but to help me better process my own thoughts. It’s always more fun, though, when you can dialogue and learn together with other people who leave comments. Which brings me to my second point…

• Persevere in what you’re doing

I go to the gym about 2-3 times per week. And trust me, I’m not a workout fiend at all. I started in the beginning of the year (January) and I’ve noticed just a little big of change ( I don’t workout that hard). But I have noticed enough change and growth that it excites me and challenges me to continue moving forward.

It’s now been about six months since I’ve been blogging consistently. Are there comments on every post? Nope. But I have seen an uptick in the amount of comments that people are leaving, and I’m getting the sense that there are some regulars who do jump in and make comments and are involved in the community and learning.

But even if nobody commented at all, would I stop? Well, that would depend on the purpose of the blog. If the purpose is to create revenue through advertising, or to try to get a book deal, or to try to use it as a marketing tool, then yes, I would close it down, because it would be deemed a failure. But since my purpose is very clear that it’s a tool to learn, I’m not discouraged by numbers.

So keep pushing through, and don’t fall for the trap and illusion of immediate results.

What about you? Have you tried something and stopped quickly because you didn’t see it working? Did you eventually see the results you were looking for?