Have you ever been forced to delay a personal project?
Maybe work interferes, or some other event in your life.
Maybe your personal project is to start up a new business, or as it was in my case, develop a set of web applications.
Side projects get delayed a lot, I have found. Usually because at the end of the day they don’t have an immediate payoff.
Or maybe you force yourself to deal with client projects first, and put your own projects aside for spare time.
I’ve been doing this for far too long. So long, that now, a couple of my personal projects have been pushed back 4, 5, even 6 years. I often come up with ideas and never actually invest the time they would require due to work commitments.
A few months ago I hit a critical point where all that I could think about was missed opportunities. Usually it happened this way: I’m browsing the internet, reading blogs, and then stumble across a brand new web application that does exactly what I wanted to do. And they’re making bank.
It was so bad, that for a while, all that I could think about was how, by accepting any new projects for other clients, I would just push back my own project yet again.
Two quick thoughts:
- Ideas are not worth very much. It’s the execution of those ideas that is important.
- Does accepting a $1,000 project (or whatever amount) actually cause me to defer potential thousands of dollars in residual income if I would just make my ideas into reality?
In conclusion, I ended up making the decision to spend time on my projects. Every weekend for the last few months I’ve been working on our web application. It’s been amazing. I have renewed enthusiasm for the other projects I work on, and I have my own “dream” becoming reality.
I encourage you to do the same. Stop delaying, and just start.
3 responses to “Delaying a Personal Dream”
Right on! I’ve had a bit of that myself lately. I had to just take a quick inventory of things I *wanted* to be doing or thought would be a good idea to do. I matched that up with the things I was *actually* doing and easily found some spots to make teeny little sacrifices to make some of the stalled or never-started things start happening.
I now have ideas flowing for surprisingly useful posts on my personal site. (They’re coming…no wisecracks on what’s already there.) 🙂 I’ve managed to get up and rolling with pushing my freelance work into a full-fledged bizniss, started running again, and cured cancer. Okay the last one is a load of crap. Hey, I was on a roll.
It really does come down to starting. Even the act of writing some things down to make it happen. Anything helps more than sitting on your thumb. Unless, your somehow interested in something that involves a lot of thumb-sitting.
I delay personal dreams by staying up late.
I’ve found that once you *commit* to doing that burning project that the phone won’t stop ringing. The secret is DON’T PICK UP!!! Instead *commit* to finishing the project asap. Once you get it done, your stock will go up that much more and you won’t miss the day labor business you ignored for a couple of days.