I don’t know how many times I felt frustrated after working on a project and not getting immediate results. As if working for a weekend would lead me to get traction in a project, visitors to a website, or followers to whatever I was building at the time.
There were plenty of times where I would create a new project, believing that my work was amazing, publish it, and get exponential growth or success for my measure for it.
This, of course, never happened.
I think that my approach was wrong because I was building for the present. I would expect results for a kind of minimal effort just because I thought that I had all I needed to succeed. But this was just a quicker way to get frustrated.
After some time, I’ve realized that the approach I was following for most of my successful projects was that I built them for the future.
The idea of building things for the future means to me that I won’t expect results right away. I have to find ways to enjoy the daily activities and focus on how to improve what I measure every day. Because if I know that the results will come over time, let’s say in 3 years, it doesn’t matter if there are no big results today.
But I also believe that when you find joy in your daily activities, you feel more fulfilled as every day is a new reason to celebrate. It is the same idea of the journey over the destination. The idea of knowing that each step counts and even if things don’t end up in the way we expect, we know that we used our time for a purpose and that is worth it.
So after having this realization, I decided that I had to take my time to see results. That I wouldn’t get desperate for progress and instead I should value every step I take.
But this was not an easy process. I didn’t know what I have to do in order to enjoy more my daily activities. But after some months and reading books like Deep Work by Cal Newport and Start with Why by Simon Sinek, I understood that a good way to get there is to create systems that take you closer to your goal, one day at a time.
What this means is that now, every time that I want to start something new, I try to set up the goal I want to achieve, try to explain it in the best way I can, and define how I will measure success. But then, I create a system that I have to follow every day that will be aligned with this goal. After I have my system running, I forget about the goal and work every day to accomplish what the system had defined for the day.
This was a game-changer for me and it gave me much more freedom to allow myself to enjoy every day. So if you are trying to start something new, I invite you to try this approach and see if it works out for you as well.
Have a wonderful week,
John
Weekly realizations
You don’t have to be vulnerable with everyone - One thing I’ve explored this week was the impact that being vulnerable with everyone can have. A good friend of mine made an amazing reflection about how it is great to be vulnerable with close friends. But you cannot expect to have such deep conversations with everyone all the time. There should be room to explore other topics and enjoy the company of other people with more than talking about our vulnerabilities.
Laravel turned 10 - As some of you may know, I love coding using Laravel. It is an amazing framework that makes so many things much easier to implement. And this week, the framework turned 10. 10 years of great coding, creating jobs for a lot of people and making one of the nicest communities of devs I know. If you are thinking of implementing a web platform, this is my first recommendation.
Highlight of the week
For some time, I’ve been working with my friend Halima, to create a podcast. We will publish an episode every Sunday starting today! You can listen to the episodes here: