Success Arrives After Preparation and Practice

After writing the Kobe Bryant themed post the other evening, I immediately fell ill. Something did not feel right.

My stomach roiled.

Chills reverberated through my body with accompanying waves of heat and fever. Toss in a stuffy nose and rough cough. I immediately shut it down, going on bed rest for the next 40 hours.

My wife Kelli seemed stunned. I am almost never sick and certainly have not been on bed rest since contracting giardia during my world travels four years ago.

But today at 12 noon, I hopped back online, feeling a little energized but largely run down, depleted and wiped out. I just consumed solids now – a few bites of a potato – after 48 hours.

I proceeded to create and publish 7 blog posts between guest posts and posts for my blog. Bloggers tend to struggle writing and publishing one post daily. Toss in my sick, almost completely exhausted, state, and this seems like a minor miracle to most bloggers.

How did I do it? I prepared myself for success by practicing writing for thousands and thousands of hours. My prolific nature, laser-focused mind and successful blogger career found me halfway.

New Bloggers: Not Ready

New bloggers often buy their domain and hosting in a state of wild excitement. Some newbies add a coaching services page to their blog after writing 5 blog posts. Nobody signs up. New bloggers feel frustrated. But nobody should sign up because new bloggers who did not prepare for success by practicing for thousands of hours simple are not ready to succeed.

Prepare by learning from pros in your niche how to succeed. Practice core skills critical to your niche to the tune of thousands and thousands of hours. The same bloggers who cannot understand how I create and publish 7 blog posts after rolling out of a “bed rest scenario for 40 plus hours” usually practice blogging for like 50, 100 or maybe 300 hours at that. Of course it sounds impossible; you did not practice enough so you have not the skills to do it. I practiced blogging for 10,000 plus hours. You are not ready because you did not put in the work. But when you do put in the work you will be ready to succeed and success follows.

Coaching Example

Imagine if you never coached a single person in your niche. Picture creating a small handful of blog posts. Publish a coaching services page. Watch what happens: nothing. Nothing should hire you because you are not ready and you are not ready because you barely practiced creating helpful content and coaching people for free.

Be thankful nobody hires you; losing your reputation as a coach immediately damages the foundation of your business. Imagine paying someone $100 to $500 to tell you what they read on a fortune cookie, inter-spaced with “umms”…”likes”….ample dead air, and repetition of the same, simple concepts without any clarifying elucidation.

Coaching requires hundreds to thousands of hours of experience in your niche. Consulting people requires confidence, clarity and a certain type of sophistication. Practice. Prepare. Position yourself to succeed.

10,000 Hours or More

My blogging buddy and I released a blogging course recently. We fire up another live session tomorrow. I will roll out of bed at 11 AM likely – I need to catch up on sleep – and will speak 30-40 minutes live about blogging on topics I became aware of 5 minutes prior to the call.

Pulling that off requires 10,000 to 15,000 hours of blogging, writing, observing, studying, analyzing, mental science, immense clarity and a calm confidence in what I know. Perhaps I appear to do these calls off of the top of my head but that is code for: “Ryan spent 15,000 hours of the past decade blogging, often for free, to prepare himself for knowing this blogging stuff inside-out.”

Practice. Prepare. Ready yourself for success. Success meets you.