We all start off as equals: tiny infants who can’t do much on their own. Forget about beautiful websites, elegant social media profiles and persuasive writing that sells itself; we can’t even smile yet!
Later on in life, we often get frustrated with ourselves when we’re first trying to learn a new skill. We expect to be naturally good at it. We expect this skill to come easily.
What we forget is that every single skill that comes easily to us now wasn’t easy at all when we were first born.
It’s no effort to feed yourself now. Pick up food; place it in your mouth. You don’t even think about it. But when you were an infant, you picked up the spoon over and over and missed your mouth entirely. You do it all the time.
You did it until you finally mastered that skill.
You don’t learn anything overnight.
You might pick up some skills more easily than others, but you still have to work hard to develop those skills. You’ve got to get comfortable with the idea that you’re still learning – and that learning means failing.
A lot.
The good news is that if you do it right, those failures can work for you. Every time the spoon missed your mouth as a child, you learned what didn’t work. Every time you got a bite in your mouth by sheer accident, you learned what did work.
That’s the attitude you want to bring to your rejections in business – so you can master the slightly more sophisticated skills of becoming a professional.
And if you get discouraged, just remember: every skill you think of as effortless now, was once incredibly hard for you.
If you keep working on your business, you’ll soon find that it will become one of the skills that’s “effortless” in your future – even though it’s a lot of work now.
