Will you do it in the dark?

Here's a mentality that I've been trying my best to keep going in my mind these past few months. It's a mentality I first heard on one of life coach Jaret Grossman's videos. The title of this article, in Grossman's words, summs up the mentality quite profoundly.

Will you do it in the dark? Will you grind to make your business work, even if no one knows you exist? Will you make movies if no one watches them? Will you practice singing if you have no guarantee that people will listen? Or, as in my case, will you write novels without certainty that anyone will ever read them? And will you found a website about personal development and commit to writing one article every day and create one video every day even if no one is reading the articles, even if no one is watching the videos?

That's the darkness - the fact that as of now, no one knows you exist. But this is what determines who you are. Some people - most people, in fact - start off a project and when they don't immediately get attention about it, they drop it. They can't find the motivation to continue doing something they don't get feedback for.

However, I've been influenced by Grossman to think that if you keep doing it even in the dark, if you have strong enough a vision and work ethic to keep grinding regardless of the lack of feedback and attention, good things will happen eventually. Because that work ethic and that vision determine your character. And everyone - everyone - with the character to do it in the dark is bound to succeed, sooner or later.

It's like a test - if you can do it, you will succeed. If you can't, you won't.

Not wanting or being able to do it in the dark simply implies one lacks the character required to handling the success.

So don't give up. Whatever your project is, make a deal with yourself that you don't care whether you get feedback or not for at least a year, and instead just keep grinding. If, after a long enough time has passed, you still haven't got the attention you'd like, you have a choice - to keep going forward expecting a larger attention bang later, or to interpret the lack of attention as negative feedback and quit and do something else. The choice is yours.

Do you have the character?