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Failure is something that has plagued me, all my life.
Scenario 1: When I was 16 I enrolled in a program to take College classes and get highschool credit for it. I was a hard working highschool student, but college was a lot less structured, and I found myself not motivated to go to school.
Final Result? My 3.85 GPA went down to a 2.0, and I could never catch up on the credits I needed to graduate with my class. I was humiliated, and just gave up altogether. I went back and got a GED when I was 22, but that sense of failure has stuck with me.
Scenario 2: I was an avid boy scout, going to scout camp, working hard to get my life scout, working towards eagle. I was even tapped for Order of the Arrow at one point -Â a prestigious elite group within the boy scouts. I worked hard to progress towards my Eagle Scout award.
Final Result: In the end I was only a few merit badges, and a service project away from my goal, but the time passed, I procrastinated, and couldn’t get everything done in time.
Scenario 3: As a Mormon, we’re encouraged to serve a 2 year mission for the Church. We are expected to pay as much of the living expenses as we can for those 2 years, and sometimes our home ward or branch can make up the difference.
Final Result: I got into the credit trap at 18, and was 3000 in the hole by the time I was ready to go on a mission. I continued further into the debt trap, and am only now getting out if it, thanks to my success in blogging.
Scenario 4: I was 23 I took a huge chance – having never lived on my own, I uprooted myself, moved to Utah, and went to Massage School. I worked hard and graduated with a 3.56 gpa. At some points I was close to not making it, and just graduating felt great.
Final Result: I graduated, but never actually got licensed, and thus have not made one dollar from that profession.
Honorable Mentions: Weight issues have always plagued me, debt has always been a struggle, and I have been known to set many goals, and just let them fall by the wayside.This of course is in the past tense, which means that we can change our course, or direction in life. I did.
My Life Now: Now I swim 3 hours x 5 days a week. I’ve lost 150 lbs since January. My Blogs are bringing in $2,580 a month. I’m going back to school in the fall for Sustainability, and Renewable Energy. Update: Scratch that, I’m currently finished my first year, changed my major to web design and software development.
Moral of the story – we all have regrets, we all have failures that loom over our head. Sometimes it’s really hard to come so far, only to fail at the last minute – but it’s part of life. Life’s best lessons are the one’s that taste sour.
Sometimes we actually self-sabotage ourselves. I know I’ve often felt inadequate, which caused me to give up on a goal prematurely. Sometimes I felt unworthy of the success waiting at the end.
Now I know that I can do anything that I desire. I can be successful, I deserve it. Stay positive and never give up. Failure only brings you closer to your ultimate success.
Inspiring post !
wow, $2580 per month. Nice job. Would you mind sharing how many blogs/sites you have and how much traffic you get?
fractalbrothers´s last blog post..Hilarious sign in a closing Circuit City
This blog gets about 1000 unique hits daily and Blog Contest Site is growing pretty good as well and gets another 500-1000 unique hits daily. Majority of my money comes from aff networks like Market Leverage, CJ, and after that I get a lot from Adbrite.
awesome. That’s some pretty nice traffic.
you ought to try kontera for the contextual advertising, it has actually converted a lot better for me than adbrite (several times better actually).
Is the majority of your traffic coming from search engines? Do you bother trying to get into directories etc. or do you do any CPC? I am a newbie as far as getting any kind of decent traffic to a blog and I would love to know any tips you might have for getting more traffic. I’m sure one thing that would help is putting the blog on a top level domain…
fractalbrothers´s last blog post..Hilarious sign in a closing Circuit City
My blog is highly social-fied – I’m writing an ebook on the subject but basically a lot of my traffic comes from social network from people who are interested in social media, but I do also get a lot of traffic from search engines. A good way to bring in traffic is to blog about hot topics that people are searching for a great plugin for this is postrank it’s a plugin for firefox that will show you which topics in your feed reader are hot. A good thing to do is blog about those topics – don’t copy but write the article in your own words and add your own opinion. I originally did post to some directories, and rss directories which may bring in some of the traffic, you can also use google trends to find good hot topics to blog about. If the topic is hot the search engine traffic will come. and yes a top level domain is absolutely huge. It’s just $9 ($1 if you go with a .info domain, but there is a lot who suggest that .info’s don’t carry as much weight as .coms)