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On Realizing Your Progress

I was listening to the Morning Coach podcast this morning as I always do, and the topic of the day was Freedom and Lifestyle.  One of the points that JB made today was that a good way to get the freedom and lifestyle you want was to always be working on something and learning on the side while you do your day job.  Another great source of how to do this is Gary Vaynerchuk's book Crush It!: Why NOW Is the Time to Cash In on Your Passion. Both speak to living your passion and learning and experiencing everything you can about it on the side so that at some point you're ready to break away and do what you love.

I've been doing just this thing for a while, as many of you may know, with an internet marketing business I've become part of.  And I've been doing my reading and experimenting with different ideas as I go along, just like anything else.  But it wasn't till today that I realized that I really WAS doing it with as much passion as I wanted.

I've always been a person who has had a hard time focusing on one thing.  Almost everything interests me - I love learning about new things and have actually had to convince myself to dislike certain things so that I didn't spend too much time on it (to the detriment of things that really matter).  You should see my Google Reader page - I follow something like 250 blogs on my reader.  No, I don't read every post by every writer every day, naturally, I skim through and look for the stuff that interests me and is relevant to what I'm doing. But it's tough for me to take any of them off because I always find something that makes me think "I'd like to try that." 

So it was a big moment for me today when I realized that I was doing what JB was talking about.  I'd found a passion, and I'd figured out a way to earn money from it.  And though my expertise with it is still in the development phase, it's off and running and I spend much of my free time with that very topic.  A big change over the days when I couldn't keep my mind on one thing for more than a week or two at best.

Don't be afraid to pat yourself on the back a bit when you realize you're making progress with your goals.  But also don't let that self-congratulations stop you from continuing to pursue it!  Don't be that salesman who makes his quota in the middle of the month and doesn't do anything more for the rest of the month.  Be the guy who goes after his goals with gusto ALL the time!

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