Someone recently sent me an email and I want to talk to you about it.
Because I see this line of thinking all over the place. And while it’s not bad and it really means well, it’ll do you a lot of harm if you try to implement it without thinking first.
So here’s one quote from the email.
“The folks who plant trees know growing them takes time, but it’s worth it in the end”.
It’s not entirely wrong, you know. It’s convoluted, but the point I guess is that if you want to sit in a nice relaxing shade on a hot day, you need to plant a seed, water it, wait patiently, and in 40 years you might be able to enjoy the fruits of your labor.
The problem is that if that’s your plan, you’re going to die of a heat stroke before you get to day 3 in your career as one of the “folks who plants trees”.
‘Tis the same with all the well meant personal development and business advice. “Start today, focus on one thing for years, and you’re sure to enjoy huge results in about 5 years!”
What happens if you starve first?
Listen.
I completely agree with the idea that you need to be patient with things. I do not agree that meanwhile you should starve.
There’s plenty of opportunity out there that lets you kind of play both fields - the short term and the long term.
To take the tree-planting analogy further, it would be like this - you’re planting a tree for the long term, but you’re also enjoying a shade right now because you were smart enough to go to Home Depot first and pick up a canopy, a chair, and a cooler with ice and bottles of water in it.
Now, this has an added side benefit, too.
Do you think that if you’re taking good care of yourself in the short term, is it reasonable to assume that the long term results would come to you faster and they would be better?
Now we’re getting to the life-changing stuff, right?
Your first goal is to take care of yourself.
No matter what your goals are, you need to make sure you have the capacity to tackle them - both mentally and physically.
Let’s go through how you do that.
Most of us are here to build an income online so I’m just going to use that as an example, but the same line of thinking applies to almost everything.
- - First, pick a strategy that provides you with short term relief - for example, if you’re hurting for cash right now, do not pick something that takes months to get going. For example, if you need to pay utilities in two weeks, look for service gigs, instead of trying to launch an ecommerce business. It’s like, if your back is hurting after years of sedentary lifestyle, the first step to recovery probably isn’t competing in the Iron Man.
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- - Second, protect the asset - which is your ability to produce. For example, a big part of the value I add to the world and receive compensation for has to do with putting persuasive, insightful words on virtual paper. So protecting my ability to write is crucial to me. That means going to bed on time, staying in reasonable shape so I can sit at my desk without my body hurting in places I didn’t know existed, and putting a hard stop on things when necessary to avoid burning out, and so on. For you this might be different - my goal here is to get you thinking about this.
- - Finally, decide on the long game. This is a crucial step - but you can only have enough mental processing power for it once you have the first 2 steps taken care of. That’s probably a key thing a lot of people (not only of the “tree planting folk” persuasion) miss. If you’ve done service gigs for a bit and paid the bills, you have bought yourself time - but use it wisely, and instead of rewarding yourself with a week of Netflix binging in the evenings, start figuring out the long term game. What’s the strategy you’re going to adopt? If you’ve taken care of the first two things I mentioned, this is a fun and easy task, because you can pick something you actually enjoy and want to do - because you have some money coming in and also have established a nice routine that lets you produce for days, weeks, months, and years.
Once you’ve implemented the above… You won’t have to wait all that long for the long term results.
To go back to the tree analogy…
You were smart about it.
You picked up some things to tide you over while your trees grow. You planted different types of trees - some of them grow super fast, some are slower. And finally, you didn’t spend all day frantically planting trees, but you also had plenty of energy to have some fun along the way.
That’s how you do it.
To Your Success, Paul Hanson
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