The other day I was thinking back to my teenage years, I used to work at my dad’s tool shop doing every boring job under the sun. I remember cleaning machine after machine, they would always get dirty again. I remember, one of the more monotonous jobs I did was gather up loose bolts from around the 30,000 sq. ft shop, and sit in front of about 25 bins and sort them according to length and width.
Getting me this job, which I worked for my entire high-school career, was the best thing my dad could have ever done for me. Not only did it motivate me to find creative and fun ways to make money, but it gave me the desire to enter into a field where I would use my brain, not just dirty my hands 10 hr per day.
Here I am several years later, about to enter into medical practice (residency starts soon), building up my online business and now jumping into the business consulting arena, I’ve found myself doing several monotonous tasks for the last couple of years as my businesses have grown. One of the worst tasks I think I can think of is the process of manually building back links. For anybody reading who isn’t familiar with back links, they are simply links on other high Page Rank sites that point back to your site with a hyperlink attached to your keyword(s). Well, when you’re first starting out online and you don’t have any extra money to pay someone to do this, it is daunting… to say the least! I remember spending entire weekends building these back links, one by one, for hours on end.
Talk about brutal!
It made me think about those days sitting in front of the bolt bins, my mind wandering, cursing the fact that I had to do it… but one day something finally ‘clicked‘ for me. That day was when I made my first $2,000 sale in my medical education business. I asked that customer how they found my business and what they told me was that they searched for “USMLE Prep Courses” in Google, and my site came up. Here’s the kicker – that was one of the keywords I had researched and been using for my business, and it was one of the keywords I had manually linked to thousands of popular sites over the course of several months. Had I not done this back link building task (something I knew and know is an absolute MUST), then I might not have made that sale, and might not be in the position that I’m currently in today.
I realized that although the feeling of boredom I got when performing the back link building process was similar to the menial task of sorting bolts in the tool shop, one was drastically different than the other. Building each back link, one at a time, over the course of months, would eventually amount to hundreds, or thousands of back links that ultimately helped me made a lot of money. So a major shift in my attitude happened, which was to enjoy the brutal and boring process that seemed to be futile. I suddenly realized that each small (although boring) step I took would amount to a mountain of success for my business.
So now my mindset is this: I think of each menial task in my business as a brick… and although I cannot build a house in a day, if I lay each brick with purpose and perfection, eventually I’m going to have myself a gorgeous house.
Love the boring tasks in your business, and instead of avoiding them you should attack them with joy because they will snowball into a massive amount of success if you keep the eye on the long-term goal – success, money, freedom! And the beauty is that once you start making some money you can outsource all of these jobs to someone who will gladly do them for you!
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