I recently told my friend Steffan, “I’m thinking about making videos out of my blogs. I think it can be a new medium for generating content.”
He said, “That’d be cool! However, I would only do that if it’s something you really wanted to do. If someone can’t spend three minutes reading your blog, I don’t think making a video will get them to the content either. And you’ll just spend more time on something you don’t actually want to be doing.”
He was right. And he didn’t charge me a therapist fee. Sucker.
Maybe one day I’ll make videos because it’ll be a good use of my time, but right now, it’d just be one more thing I’m trying to do.
I often struggle with feeling like I haven’t done enough. If something I’ve done isn’t massively successful (and nothing I’ve ever done has been) then I wonder if I worked hard enough or if I did something wrong.
I don’t want to be someone who half-attempted something. I want to go all out and know that I gave it my all. But not everything is meant to be a smash success.
I get leery of advice gurus who act like anything you think of can be successful if you work hard enough. It’s just not true.
I’ve been thinking about this formula recently:
Success = (Hard Work) + (Luck)
There are a lot of hard working people with great ideas and great content who we will never hear about. And conversely, there are a lot of people who got lucky. The Snuggie was not a groundbreaking idea. It was a robe you put on backwards. However, it was dumb enough to get attention.
And I am dumb enough to own one.
I’m not sure how accurate my success formula is, but it makes sense to me. However, if you’re a Christian, then it should probably be more like this:
Success = (Hard work) + (God’s leading) – (What you’ve wrongly defined as success)
There are a lot of “successful” people who are successful in one area, and total failures in another. I remember hearing a speaker in college talk about his success. He worked 12-14 hour days and said that’s what it takes to be successful. He also said he had been divorced three times. That’s what success has cost him.
I don’t want that kind of success if it means losing what I truly count as success.
So for me, I need to do what I like doing, which is writing, and then trust God to do what he wants with it. I don’t need to think up awesome new ideas so God can know I’m working hard. That is my insecurity and pride telling me I haven’t done enough.
The boy who had the five loaves and two fish didn’t wake up and say, “How much do I need to bring for Jesus to multiply this for 5,000 people?” He just brought what he had.
Take the little you have, work hard on it, and then put it in the hands of Jesus. If it’s what God wants you to be doing, and you give it all you have, then I think that’s success.
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