Building Success: Driven Go-Getters vs. Exploiters

Building success does, without doubt, come with many challenges.

For most of us, when we see the words "building success," we tend to think of all the work, planning and perseverance, but we tend to overlook such things as envy and simple misunderstandings of someone's intention.

I was talking to an artist friend recently, and she was telling me about a different artist she had been following on social media, but dropped because "he was so spammy and annoying."

Being ever curious, I decided to poke into it a bit...

It didn't take long for me to grasp that the "spammy and annoying" artist was actually very commercially successful, with over 550,000 followers on Facebook, multiple published "how to" books and a consistent marketing campaign going back more than a decade.

Of course, this is quite different from someone who is literally spamming and trying to profit from something sketchy.

The "message" here is that there's a huge difference between sending daily updates to your opt-in followers, and being active across many social media channels... and actual spamming and exploiting."

And this is where human envy might come into the picture. Or some feelings/thoughts along those general lines.

If you're in the same field — in this case, being a commercial artist — and have expectations of "results" from a much lower level of motivation and ambition... that more successful and driven person may well seem like they are "spammy and annoying" to you... perhaps because their activity level and degree of success is an unwelcome reminder to you of a perception of the truth you don't really want to be true:

Often, success comes from a lot of hard work and being driven, rather than from artistic genius and/or some other form of brilliance.

In some ways, it's a mindset that was born out of the digital age, where we have "instant access" to success stories across a wide range of entrepreneurial niches — from art, to blogging, to game development — so we have much readier sources for comparison to ourselves... and it's easy to get lost in the "fog" of being more concerned about what our competitors/colleagues are doing than our own ventures.

I remember being at a self-development seminar many years ago, and one of the quotes I permanently took with me — and frequently refer back to — goes like this:

Comparisons are deadly! Your life, is YOUR life!

Of course, there's nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from those who are already successful in your chosen area... but there's an almost equally slippery slope to descending into a place of becoming annoyed and despondent because we're not getting the same degree of success... with much less effort than it took the person we're admiring decades to reach!

That's what I mean by "deadly" comparisons!

We even see it here on Steemit, where people arrive and get upset because they are not earning $20 per post within a week of their arrival... completely overlooking that those who do get substantial earnings have steadily been building a following for seven years!

Don't be an exploiter... be a go-getter!

Thanks for stopping by, and have a great remainder of your week!

How about you? Have you ever caught yourself growing envious of someone who had more success than you? Did you remember that they had much more experience? Leave a comment if you feel so inclined — share your experiences — be part of the conversation!

(All text and images by the author, unless otherwise credited. This is ORIGINAL CONTENT, created expressly for this platform — Not posted elsewhere!)

Created at 2023.11.30 00:12 PST
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