Make No Assumptions About Success

It was surprising to see how radically my site’s visitor statistics changed overnight. One day, LifeReboot receives 9,000 hits from 850 unique visitors. The next day, LifeReboot receives over 700,000 hits from 36,000 unique visitors. That’s just amazing. That’s incredible progress. That’s the power of the Internet.

The traffic spike occurred thanks to the social bookmarking site Digg, where people can see what’s new and popular on the Internet. It featured two of my articles on its front page, leading thousands of Digg users to my site.

Consequently, LifeReboot experienced a day where it received 42 times as many visitors as what I’ve come to consider “normal,” the number of LifeReboot subscribers tripled, and the earnings from advertisements jumped from five to fifty dollars. It’s quite exciting.

I’m trying to be careful though, because it is tempting to label LifeReboot a success.

It’s easy to jump to conclusions about the future of LifeReboot, and imagine that with the site earning $50 per day, it will yield $1500 per month.

It won’t — or if it will, it won’t yet. This traffic spike is an isolated event. An anomaly. One exception to the norm that shouldn’t be mistaken as a representation of every day henceforth. Success doesn’t work that way.

Success won’t arrive on your doorstep overnight.

To truly attain success, you must strive towards it gradually. I didn’t write two articles and suddenly appear in the Digg spotlight. I wrote fifty articles over the course of four months, and two of them drew in an audience.

The majority of the things I’ve published on LifeReboot barely made a splash. Regardless of this, I kept writing every day, hoping the articles I published would eventually get noticed. As a result, I’ve learned the secret to success:

You either strive towards success every day, or you don’t.

For example: I want to be a writer, so I write every day.

There are some days when I write things that aren’t good enough to publish. There are some days when I can’t get all of my thoughts out in one sitting. There are some days when I come back to something I started writing before and then decide I’d rather write something completely different.

Regardless of these bumps in the road, I’m always pressing forward. Whenever I’m tempted to say that I’m successful, I try and imagine the effort I put forth to get to where I am. Then I remind myself: You need to maintain the same level of effort to maintain the same level of success.