Taking the hard road [How to succeed against the odds]

I don’t know what your future is, but if you’re willing to take the harder way, the more complicated one, the one with more failures at first than successes … then you will not regret it. – Chadwick Boseman, Howard University commencement speaker

I've traveled roads so hard I didn't even know if there was a road at all. I live in snowy Minnesota, after all. I know other places have lots of snow, too. This is not a complaint about how the road I take is harder than the roads of others. We all have our mountains to climb.

This post is about succeeding!

We all want to be successful, right? We wouldn't be here at Wealthy Affiliate otherwise. I mean, we can have "social media" on Facebook if that's all we're here for.

Being successful has been written about tens of hundreds of times here at Wealthy Affiliate.

Why is that?

Because it is important. It is what we are striving for.

I don't have a step-by-step guide telling you how to succeed. Nor do I have a way to tell you if you have reached success. Those things are for you to determine. I do not know what success means to you. I only know what it means to me.

What I can tell you, however, are some tidbits of sage advice that I have learned over the course of my life and especially since joining Wealthy Affiliate.

How to succeed against the odds

1. You may have heard the phrase, "Sometimes the only way out is through."

When you are in the midst of your journey—be it a good one or a bad one—sometimes things can happen that are not expected. Sometimes you just have to go through them to get to the other side.

Once you have gone through them, you can come out the other side a stronger, better person.

A stronger person can handle more weight and responsibility. But how would you have become stronger, had you not had to fight something or go through a difficult thing? Even a body builder or weight lifter has to go through difficult training to become stronger.

When we are first starting at WA we are ambitious and ready to make some money. But then, we write our blog posts and nothing happens. We check the analytics. We write more posts. And still NOTHING HAPPENS!

We get frustrated. We rant! We rave! We consider giving up.

We pour ourselves a big cup of "UGH" and piddle away the time we could be directing toward the growth of our website businesses!

Sometimes the only way out is through!

Drink that big ol' cup of UGH and stay the course! If you don't force yourself through it, you will have given up without ever knowing if around the next turn you had made a sale. Or acquired a new reader. Or whatever.

2. That leads me to the second piece of advice I have, "Never ever give up!"

It can be so easy to give up—I know. I've done it hundreds of times! When things don't go my way, I get angry and upset. I throw a "pity party". I mope around. I quit!

But the advice of never ever give up remains.

Look at that little frog in the illustration. He is fighting! He is not giving up even though his little head is nearly in the gullet of that bird!

He's going to fight! He's going to give that bird something to think about!

Even if he doesn't succeed, he is going to try. He is never ever going to give up until there is no other option (or the bird moves on to easier prey!).

In this very competitive business, we can't give up—EVER!

When we do, well, it gives our competition the edge because that is one less blogger/affiliate marketer they have to worry about.

I could go on for hours about this topic, but I know we all have other things we need to do. All the other adages I have really center around these two that I shared. "Go through it" and "never give up!"

If you can do those two things, you can probably do anything!

For those who enjoy the celebrations on Halloween, please have a fun and safe night. For those who don't, may you also have a fun and safe night!

Best wishes,
Karin