Good morning!
When I started my entrepreneurial journey last August, I knew I was in for a lot of hard work. There was so much that I didn’t know: how to set up an LLC, how to publish on Kindle, how to market the book by getting reviews and spending money on ad campaigns. Of course, I knew from my time in college that you have to spend money to make money, but I’d always assumed that money would be easy to come by (or, perhaps better, using the company money!).
It isn’t. And when you run your own company, its money is your money. As a conservative investor, you can imagine the pain I felt when I had to part with some of my savings to get my company off the ground. Was it worth it?
You bet.
I’ve learned so much by running my own company that I can apply to future jobs down the road should this not pan out. And I’m continuing to learn more. Recently I’ve been reading a lot of books on social media marketing, and I’m picking up all sorts of stuff that I’m going to add to my arsenal. And the best part is that once I’ve learned something, I can implement it super fast. Case in point: I went from the idea of The GPA Game to a draft in about two weeks. Another couple of weeks I had set up everything I needed to publish it, got it edited, and created a cover.
It’s easy to be laser-focused when things are done, or nearing completion. Things are easy then.
That isn’t the case for the writing process, though. It’s hard to not be daunted when you’re sitting in front of the blank screen. You can’t wait to publish your words for the world to read, but then you realize that can’t happen until you’ve put your thoughts to the keys. In many cases, it makes me want to quit, especially because I have a habit of being easily distracted when I write. Why start when something is going to stop me soon after?
I can’t let that get the best of me when I write, however, or I wouldn’t get anything done. And since this is my full-time job at the moment, I can’t afford to not get anything done. So I push forward. I turn off the internet. I close my door. I write after others have gone to sleep. The result is a hard-earned manuscript. But once that’s in hand, it’s easy to make edits, to get it ready for publication. There isn’t much waiting once the words are down. It’s full-steam ahead.
It’s how I wrote The GPA Game. It’s how I wrote my two upcoming fiction projects and my book about NASCAR, Trouble In Turn 3: Where NASCAR Went Wrong & How to Fix It.
It’s probably how I’ll write the rest of my stories.
To me, it doesn’t matter how the work gets done as long as it does. It’s hard work, sure, but I’m a fan of hard work. Writing is super hard, but I couldn’t imagine life without it.