How to Build a Successful Project

Have you ever wondered why certain people succeed several times while others seems to fail project after project? I’ve always wanted to know what makes the difference from successful vs unsuccessful people. When I was young, when someone asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I always responded with I want to become a millionaire. Eventually when grew up I realized that life is different from what I thought initially, and becoming a millionaire is not a job you can find on the news paper and there are certainly other things more important than having a million dollars in the bank. But that’s not a valid excuse to stop following a dream and that’s why I started to study how other people can build successful lives.

I’m sure that if you are reading this, chances are that you already know about the importance of failing several times, learning for mistakes, etc, so I’ll try to not bother you with these kind of informations, instead I want to focus on persistence. Persistence is the ability to stick with something for a long enough period of time.

Unfortunately mass media and advertisers makes us believe that successful projects are built overnight, which is not true. The problem is that we are affected by this mentality in everything we do. Want a proof? Remember when you started a diet and you interrupted it after a month? Or when you started to work on that cool project that should have made you rich that is now a remote document on you hard disk? I’m sure you can come up with more examples. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to understand why you always gave up on those occasions?

The answer is simple: when you started your project, you were full of good intentions, you knew that by following your program you would have realized your goal, but after a month or two, after the initial motivation started to drop, you were telling yourself that the program maybe was not working for you, and you’d better try something else instead. Eventually, story repeated itself with all the other projects.

I hope that by now you already see how much we are affected by the overnight success philosophy.

So how can you build a successful project? First, realize that you need a long enough period of time. Be realistic, successful bloggers starts to see substantial results after months or even years of consistent work, diets work over a long period of time because your body need to detoxicate first from the years of junk food you ate. Virtually any project or profession have a certain period of time that separates wannabes from professionals.  Decide in advance if you are willing to pay the price to become successful before wasting hundred of hours in something you don’t like to do.

It is crucial that once you encounter the phase where results are stalled, you aggressively push yourself and your project ahead by inventing new marketing techniques or by improving your product. This can dramatically reduce the amount of time required for you project to be profitable. When you’ll have overcome this phase, results will be ten times better than the amount of resources you previously allocated, so don’t be afraid of working too much.

Week after week track the results of what you are doing. Keep what’s working and discard what’s wasting you energy and time. At the same time study how other businesses in your niche who already succeeded are doing and try to imitate them. It’s essential that you study people who already made it if you want to see results.

What about already successful projects? If you are lucky that your project grew to the point that it is now paying his huge dividends, continue to improve it aggressively. You don’t want other people to imitate you in a short period of time. Continue to give it the best of you and eventually you’ll reach another point where your project will pay you another ten times better than it is now.

Posted on July 18 2009

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