“Your machines came.”
I smile through the phone and ask if everything went okay with the delivery.
“Umm, it looks like a lot more than you expected.”
“Oh serious?” I ask. “I will look at it when I get home.”
A few hours later I pull up to my house and open the garage door.
I already cleared plenty of space for the delivery but I am not prepared for what I am about to see.
There is no room left.
Boxes fill the garage from wall to wall and floor to ceiling.
Suddenly, I see the daunting task that lays before me.
I had spent a few months looking at business ideas and decided to buy candy machines.
Originally, I was going to buy just a couple and build the business little by little.
The factory offered me a crazy killer deal on 64 new machines and probably too impulsively, I jumped in with both feet.
In this moment, I am hit with the full realization of what needs to happen and the amount of work and time required from me to even get started.
It’s November in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I have to put together 64 candy machines in my unheated garage with almost no space.
I need to fill them all with an ungodly amount of candy, and then go deliver all these machines to businesses so people will start filling them with money.
I don’t often cry, but I am close to tears and frostbit fingers after about three hours and it looks like I haven’t even made a dent.
I go inside to have dinner and unwind before crawling in my bed completely exhausted.
I still had to go to work the next day at my full time job and then come home to repeat the process.
This continued for weeks.
I would come home from work, build machines, fill them with candy, and deliver them.
After several days, the task was finally done and I remember the feeling of delivering that last batch of machines.
In all honesty, I would not take on that much at once again.
It was a nightmare and pretty miserable in my cold garage for several nights.
The moral of the story here is that, I did finally finish.
Once the machines were placed, it only took a couple days each month to run the entire business.
The massive benefits I experienced later came from a monumental amount of work up front.
It was more time, work, and money than I had expected, but I kept at it consistently and eventually, I reached my goal.
I don’t know any big or world-changing benefit that was not achieved little by little.
I recently heard a story about a man who bought a small patch of farm land in Utah north of Salt Lake City.
He only had a few dollars when he moved into the area and could not afford much.
The land itself was not worth much and he was able to buy a plot with what he had.
However, he farmed and worked hard and soon bought an additional plot of land adjacent to his own.
He farmed this new plot as well and continued to do the same for several years until he owned acres of farm land in the area and started to accumulate more wealth.
As Salt Lake City grew, people started moving closer to the gentleman and his land values started increasing.
As he grew old and farming became more difficult, developers began offering large sums of money for his land.
As you can imagine, the man became rich.
It would appear that he was lucky and became wealthy overnight to outsiders in that instant.
However, the man had worked hard little by little and day after day building his estate for many years.
They had not seen the hot and cold work days.
They were not there for the blisters, bad harvests, and close calls.
Except for maybe lottery winners, (look at the odds and don’t waste your money) nobody gets rich overnight.
Even big actors and sports stars typically put in ridiculous hours, time, sweat, tears, and blood before getting their big break.
Even in their case, they are the few that make it out of so many that don’t.
There is not a real get rich quick plan.
It really doesn’t exist.
It takes day after day of consistent effort toward a goal and never giving up on it.
If you want to get started, but it looks too big, break it down to daily tasks and do what you need to do today to get you one day closer.
Then, tomorrow, do what you need to do again.
In a year from now, you will either be closer to that goal, or just a year older.
Some opportunities don’t stick around and perhaps it will be gone.
Maybe you are in the trenches already and working toward a big goal.
If you feel frustrated and tired, then you are on the right path.
I find it helpful to manage my expectations and learn to enjoy the journey, but just know there are some brutally hard shitty days.
That’s why the great days feel so so great.
Embrace the process, the mundane tasks, and all the parts that are hard or boring.
It is all making you the person that you need to be in order to accomplish the end goal.
Thank you for reading.
Phillip Adams
Searching for a bookmarked site and came across this. Good for you Phillip! Never stop writing. You are exceptionally gifted.