The expectation – progress discrepancy
Published on March 21, 2018
Published on Wealthy Affiliate — a platform for building real online businesses with modern training and AI.
When I joined WA about 4 weeks ago, my expectation was to learn a bit about affiliate marketing. I hoped to find some useful information to build on.
However, going through Course 1 of the Certification, I was amazed how much structured information I was presented and how quickly you could complete the tasks doing something you had never done before. So there was far more progress than expected.
But this set a new expectation, that you might be able to whizz through the tasks of each course just as fast. Of course, you couldn’t as some of the tasks were far more time consuming and complex than others. Writing a keyword-rich post takes longer than finding a keyword for your post.
The question now was: Should I be strict with myself, stick to my plan and complete all the tasks set by me for that day - even if it meant sacrificing more sleep and feeling knackered the following day? Or should I be lenient and say to myself, okay, you set these tasks for today, however, you didn’t quite know what they were and how long they would take?
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What would you have done?
For me, situations like that are quite tricky as I believe that to reach your goals you sometimes must be strict with yourself because if you allow yourself to procrastinate you might lose focus and the chance to reach your goal.
On the other hand, you don’t want to be too harsh with yourself and lose the joy of learning as that might decrease your chances of reaching your goal, as well.
What I decided to do in the end was to fill the gap between my expectation and my progress. So that day, I went ahead with my original plan, wrote my post at night, slept for 4 hours, was knackered the following day, but happy to have achieved something. But for the future, I agreed with myself on checking the tasks first and then deciding on how much of them to complete. After all, there is a long journey ahead and you have to find a way of seeing it through to the end.
Hopefully, this is the right sort of progress – expectation balance.
Have a great day.
Take care,
Sammy
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