No B.S Friday: Most people quit too soon and this is why…
The dreaming is fun, the doing is hard.
This is always true.
When you’re dreaming into a new project – maybe it’s the road to becoming a financially self-sufficient investor – when you’re in the dreaming phase, it’s all good.
You imagine what that road will bring you – wealth, free time, more connection with your loved ones, a massive rocket-powered yacht. It all looks amazing.
And you imagine what the road itself is like. The work looks interesting. There’s you, crunching numbers under a kerosene lamp, while etheric numbers and equations swirl around you. You’re inspired. Your pencil is moving with a frenetic burst of genius.
Your wife comes in the room. She knows you’re working hard and she’s brought you a cup of tea. She looks at your equations and she’s impressed. She hugs you from behind and kisses your neck. But you won’t be distracted. You have equations to solve.
And so she takes off your glasses and hides them behind her back. You put your arms around her trying to get them back. Now you’re kissing. Now you’re making love on the desk, as the architectural plans spilling across the floor.
It’s all amazing. Everything looks good through the lens of dreaming.
But then there’s the reality. You’re trying to study but it’s late and you’ve already worked a full day and now you have a headache. The kids are fighting, and your wife is grumpy because you didn’t unstack the dishwasher like you said you would. None of your equations are working out and you remember that you’re not good at maths. You get an angry email from the architect because his plans are all crumbled and dirty.
The dreaming is fun, the doing is hard.
It’s always like this. We’re never really able to imagine how hard a journey is going to be before we begin it. I think this is by design. If we actually knew we’d probably never get started.
But in every journey, at some point, you’re going to say, “Wow. This is harder than I imagined it would be.”
And at this point you’re vulnerable.
At this point, another dream is going to come along and try to seduce you.
You’ve been working hard to master property investing, and just as it gets hard, you’re going to see a video about foreign exchange trading. And you’re going to let yourself dream into that.
And the dreaming is going to look good. There’s you at a work station with three screens. Sophisticated trading charts reflect in the lenses of your glasses. Your wife knocks at the door. She’s brought you a cup of tea…
And at that point, you’re going to compare the dream of FX trading to the doing of property investing.
And the dream is going to look better.
But the dream always looks better.
If you could compare the doing of FX with the doing of property, you’d realise that it’s about the same, and you’ve come this far with property so you may as well keep going.
But very few of us can do this.
Many of us fall into the trap of comparing doing with dreaming, unaware that dreaming is always going to look better.
And so we tap out of property and dive into FX, only to be seduced out of the doing of FX in six months when the doing gets hard and we’re offered the new and exciting dream of drop-shipping, or whatever it is.
So we have to be aware of this.
The dreaming is fun, the doing is hard.
And we can’t compare dreaming and doing, no more than we can compare apples and oranges.
And when the doing gets hard, just know that at that point, it’s very easy for another dream to seduce you.
Don’t do it. Stay the course. You’ll get there. I think I can hear your wife coming up the stairs with a cup of tea…
JG.
V says
This is such a sad story..
“Your wife comes in the room…”
“She hugs you from behind and kisses your neck…”
“You put your arms around her…”
“Now you’re kissing. Now you’re making love on the desk…”
“Wow. This is harder than I imagined…”
“…Why most people quit too soon?”