Fail Hard and Fail Fast, You Can Only Gain From It
Failing can be a tough blow on your path, unless you develop a growth-mindset that can help you benefit from it.
Hi friends,
This has been quite a long week, and this email is being sent out much later than I originally planned. This week’s email will be focusing on Medium struggles and strategies 😄
A Look Into Medium Stats
Ever since I decided to go back to Medium and start this Solopreneur journey, I’ve made a commitment to publish every Wednesday. It’s not a big deal, one article per week is completely doable — it’s all about consistency, not frequency.
I’ve been pulling in decent viewing number, nothing crazy. About 5.5 views per day ever since I published my “first” article — Fail, Again and Again, Your 1,001st Idea Might Work, — on October 10.
As usual, I had a strong start on social media — I was tweeting, sharing posts and stories on Instagram, and posting on Facebook, every few hours every day. Now the interesting thing is that it all stopped on October 17. I haven’t been online ever since.
For the first few days, my views dipped to 1 per day, but ever since October 22, they’ve been averaging 5 per day. Do you know this means? I’m getting organic traffic.
Whatever you’re doing, this should be your goal.
As satisfying and rewarding it is to see a surge in views when you’re all over social media sharing your work, at the end of the day, your hope is to achieve freedom in life.
You want to create a framework that will generate views (and profit!) even when you’re not actively working on it.
This is why it’s important you remember to celebrate every little milestone — there are a lot more hardships ahead before you make it.
Medium Publications vs Self-Publishing
As you can imagine, even though 5.5 daily views was a better average than 0, I still wanted more.
For this week’s post, I wrote about how to stay on track with your solopreneur goals. I explained the importance of prioritizing your tasks so you can achieve consistent results.
As it’s a mixture of personal struggles with a motivational plan, it makes it the perfect candidate for The Ascent, a Medium publication. Taken from their submission guidelines:
We believe in authentic, personal storytelling. The stories that perform best here are rooted in firsthand experience and packed with tons of value, in the form of personal lessons and profound takeaways for the end reader.
The big issue here is that I submitted my story on Tuesday, and today’s Saturday. I’m still waiting for a response.
Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
As I’m not one of those bloggers who has an editorial calendar (yet), that was the only post I wrote for the week. And since it’s been submitted, I need to wait until I’m approved or denied. I’m screwed.
Could I have written another post already? Of course. This email would make a great Medium post (it probably will, at some point) but that’s not the point.
Currently, I’m in the initial stages of my solopreneur journey. I have a very small audience — thank you for being a part of it! — which means now’s the perfect time to fail.
I want to fail as much as I can before I make it big. I want to try everything and find out what doesn’t work right now. If I had a perfect launch and grew a six-figure audience (and business) overnight, I’d have a lot more to lose if I failed.
I’m not trying to sugarcoat it, I know no one likes to fail.
The truth is, if you want to be a solopreneur, you have to be prepared to fail. And you have to develop the kind of growth-mindset capable of looking at failures as a building block in your path.
When you fail, you’re one step ahead of anyone else who hasn’t — you know already that one thing doesn’t work, unlike them. A great man once said,
Failure is the fuel to success. — Soichiro Honda
Somedays you’ll accept it effortlessly; you’ll see immediately where you went wrong and how you can do better. Other days, it will be hard. You will feel overwhelmed, underachieved, and lost.
On such days, I’ve learned to give myself a break and take it easy. Is it delaying my success? Probably, but you should never put success ahead of your well being.
This Week’s Key Takeaways
It’s all about consistency, not frequency — start out by committing to a weekly post/podcast/video/newsletter. Once you’re comfortable with that, you can increase the frequency.
Focus on the traffic you get when you’re not active, instead of the traffic you have when you’re all over social media. Remember, you want this online business to generate passive income, at some point.
Celebrate all the small milestones — being a solopreneur is probably the hardest career you could have so it’s important you congratulate yourself every step of the way.
Always have a backup plan — if you’re relying on someone else to publish your content, make sure you have extra material you can fall back on if they don’t meet your deadlines. It’s okay to have an odd week where you posted more than usual, it doesn’t mean you have to do it again the following week.
Don’t be afraid to fail, the more you do, the faster you learn!
Never place success ahead of your well being. Otherwise, you won’t be able to enjoy it when you do, for one reason or another.
Homework — Yes, this is for you!
What was that one failure that discouraged you this week?
You can just hit Reply or even like or comment on this post online, as I’ve switched to Substack as of this week 😄
Have a fantastic weekend, and I’ll be back next week ✌️
— Mauro