So what if I am too fired up at work?

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

The other day, a colleague of mine gave feedback to me that I was too energetic when doing my work. He didn’t go further, but he told me that he heard people were talking about me, telling me that I was too fired up.

But did I care? No.

It’s because my dream is to be an entrepreneur and to be one, you need to work more than anyone else. The 9 to 5 work hours daily doesn’t apply to entrepreneurs, because once they create a Startup and are committed to seeing it grow, they must work 5–10 hours daily, or even more. Painful, right?

Let’s take an example from Jack Ma. His company was nearly bankrupt before Alibaba could make money, now that’s a desperate moment where a 9 to 5 work hour daily is not applicable to. He must work hours on end before the company earned billions.

What we can learn here is that, if we want to create our own business, we must commit 200% to our work every day. Yes, there might not be any rest, that’s why many people aren’t willing to do that. Because we must learn everything such as Business Development, Content Writing, Marketing, etc. As a StartUp, we are always in a budget. There are times when we can’t afford more employees, and that’s when we have to learn by ourselves.

Using Medium as an example:

Let’s say Medium pays us $1 per read from readers for a 5-minute read and you have 300 followers, (I’m not sure for the actual payments, though I think it can be less than that depending on the reads), and you want to make $5,000. Sadly, sometimes, only half of your followers are usually interested in your specific writings/articles, so you might lost half of your readers in your followers when you release an article. That means you need to attract A LOT OF READERS to read my article.

1 read= Read by 150 people

5000 reads= Read by 750,000 people!!

Now, how do you get these 750,000 people?? How do we attract 750,000 people to read our stories?? Why must they read our articles??? If you are new, this is why many writers are aiming for curations for their articles.

So what must we do?

Advises I get from successful Medium writers, who made a living out of writing on Medium and other blogs, they had to write every day and learn how to market their articles. That means, they must find a topic thoroughly, create a title that gets people’s attention, have quality in their writings, and advertise the writings. Most of these writers have their e-mailing lists, publications, and social media to increase their networking.

Now, does this look like something that you can work 8 hours a day as a newbie? Of course not!! For new writers like me, they must write every day!! and truth to be told, I had a hiatus for weeks, and I was losing, due to my work. So, this year, I need to write some more to make up for the losses last year.

That’s why when my colleagues told me to ‘hold your horses’, I can’t do that if I want to be an entrepreneur. Because we are living in the internet world, it’s up 24/7, and the beauty of it is that we can reach a wider audience in an instant. But the downside is that because it’s an instant communication world, everyone wants their stuff NOW. If you are slow in your work, then no one will wait for you and will move one. You could even lose to competitors because you are too slow for them.

This is the harsh reality that we must face. We must keep learning every day, like what Richard Branson said:

“My biggest motivation? Just to keep challenging myself. I see life almost like one long University education that I never had — every day I’m learning something new.”

Learn every day and work hard for it. Read that Marketing book, try it out, talk to people for feedback, find out how to improve your quality and increase the quantity. These are something we must question ourselves daily.

And no matter what, to reach our dreams, as I said, we have to put 200% of our effort daily. Yes, it’s tiring, it’s rough, but it’s worth it in the long term. Don’t think about how fun your friends are doing now, but think of how fun you will be doing 10 years from now whilst they didn’t do anything to achieve their dreams. As Tony Gaskins said:

“If you don’t build your dream someone will hire you to help build theirs.”

I hope you learn something from here, and to read more of my new articles, be sure to follow my Medium. Until next time!