Take the Easy Road

Take the advice of a genius who wasn't allergic to hard work and knew how to persist.

Thomas Edison once said, "I never failed once. It just happened to be a 2000-step process."

Your evaluator's kind words in the critique of your copywriting piece, travel letter or graphic design work may not assuage the sinking feeling in your stomach. Nor may it lessen the disappointment in discovering you have a lot to learn.

You may bask in your feelings of inadequacy for minutes, hours or days. There are those who never recover. Suffering is their specialty.

On June 14^th and 25^th 2004. Michael Masterson wrote a two part series in Early to Rise (#1156 and #1157) called "Gini's Challenge:Embrace Your So-Called "Incompetence" and Force Yourself to Succeed Anyway." If you haven't read it I suggest you do so. His article strikes to the core of every beginning freelancer's struggle. He explains, "Most important endeavors begin in ignorance and succeed through pain. If you don't have the persistence to endure the pain, you won't get to enjoy the success."

Everyone experiences pain on the way to success.

However not everyone suffers. Some don't even see the effort they put into succeeding...as painful.

It seems there are two roads to success – one is easy and one is hard. The hard road is laden with suffering making the journey difficult.

Have you ever met a person who no matter the circumstance just breezes through life? People like this are rare but do exist.

Two sisters I knew, were a study in opposites. Both were high achievers.

One took the hard road and indulged in suffering. When first learning to walk, she by-passed walking and started out running. Always demanding instant perfection, even as a baby, she reached for the top of the scale before having mastered the bottom. She would fall, well up with tears of frustration, cry ... and protest her failures. The pain of learning how to walk became exaggeratedly evident. But persistent she was and four days after tackling "learning how to walk" she was running around.

The other sister took the easy road. Achieving her first step, she landed on her fanny and giggled. Moving through her learning process at a perfect gradient of difficulty, she never took on more than she could easily handle. Pain of falling never fazed her. In fact pain or difficulty never crossed her mind. She steadily pushed through efforts to walk, making it look easy, estimating the necessary effort to accomplish walking and doing it.

How well do you estimate your efforts?

You take on an enormous project and allow too little time to meet the deadline. You tackle an advanced graphic design class without having the beginning course firmly under your belt. Your client finds your sales letter disappointing, not what he was expecting. All because you failed to ask enough questions in determining what he wanted.

Painfully frustrated...embarrassed...and discouraged. That's how you may feel when venturing into unknown territory. It takes courage to discover that your skill sorely lacks expertise, but at least you've got the moxie to be pioneering your way.

Time and experience will help you adjust your efforts. Whether the pain of "not getting it right" lasts seconds, minutes, days, weeks, months or years – the amount of time you choose to suffer – lies in your hands. You can decide the effort was so unbearable that you'll never go through it again. Or you can realize it's just effort – wrongly estimated – and part of learning. You can even laugh about it and turn the ridiculousness of your foible into a funny anecdote.

If you find yourself entertaining the idea of suffering, don't worry...it happens. I caught myself the other day telling a business partner it would take six months to a year to turn a new freelancing venture into a viable business. I flashed him a doleful look of "woe is me".

He responded, "Six months to a year isn't very long."

Pain and suffering...shot down with one sentence.

Just get in there and keep plugging. Quit feeling sorry for yourself if it takes hard work to reach your goal. Quit focusing on your incompetence. Instead concentrate on improving. Concentrate on the competence – you dream of achieving.

Is there anything that can make this freelancing challenge more palatable, more pleasurable?

Yes. No matter how tempting...don't get lured into suffering. Take the easy road.