Start Something Early. Start Today

If I had a chance to look at myself in the present situation 5 years back, I wouldn’t have believed it. Just like it is hard for me now to believe that I might run a company with 1000+ employees 10 years later.

May be one day I will run a large organization, but right now it is out of my reality. No matter what I do, it is very unlikely that I will have a 1,000 employees working in my company within the next one year, or even five years. May I will one day, may be I won’t. I honestly don’t know.

It is hard to predict where you will be 5 years, 10 years and 20 years down the line. But you don’t need that clarity when you are starting.

Right now, what I do is in my comfort zone and I am slowly pushing the boundaries as I grow along with my company. It is a slow process and it is difficult to see visible change happening over a long period of time.

What took me to this point with my business and blog is not about what I did in the past one week or the past one month. It is about what I have been doing for the past 10 years.

My blog DigitalDeepak.com, the corner stone of my business was started in 2013. Until 2016, the blog did not make any revenue. I was not working too much on my blog either.

If I look at my archives, I have posted around 2-3 blog posts a month, but I have done it for the past 5 years consistently.

Having started early has helped me grow the blog and the business around the blog to this point where I am today.

If you haven’t started anything yet, you can’t do anything about the past. You can go back in time and start a business 10 years back. But you can start today.

The best time to plant a tree was 20 years back. The next best time is today.

And just like a tree takes time to grow, a business also takes time.

Starting today doesn’t mean that you have to leave everything and just focus on growing a startup full time. You can start with a business plan. May be a Facebook Group. May be a blog. May be a newsletter.

When you start something, it gains some momentum. When it gains momentum, it is very enticing to add some more work to it and give it more momentum. And it becomes easier over time.

Today, I have more than 50,000 unique visitors to my blog every month and that happened because I have published more than 250 articles on my blog over the past 5 years.

I have a huge email list and I pay more than $2,000 a month just for tools and hosting services. I could have never reached this point if I did not publish the first article on DigitalDeepak.com in 2013.

If I tell you that one day you will have 100 employees, have offices in 3 cities, and make millions of dollars a year in revenue, it might be very hard for you to wrap your head around it. But when you get there, it is not going to be as complex as you think it would be.

We all grow through life and get new capabilities.

You are able to read and comprehend what I am saying in this blog post and it is not very complex for you. But if you were a 7 year old kid who just started learning the English language, it would have been impossible for you to get what I am saying.

Your business and your capability to manage a large business grows over time.

When a tree grows, you cannot see any visible change on a daily basis, or even a weekly basis. But you know that if you keep nurturing the tree, you would have a fully grown tree that gives shade and bears fruits in a period of 10 years.

Even for a large tree, you start with a small seed. A tree grows effortlessly. It doesn’t “work hard” to grow. But it grows everyday, a little bit at a time. Given enough time, it becomes magnificent.

If you start early enough, if you start today, 10 years down the line you will have a business that creates value for its customers, provides work opportunities for employees and vendors and creates massive good wealth for yourself.

You don’t need to do everything today, or even this week or the month. You just need to start today.

The power of initiative is not too hard to tap into. You just need to stop listening to the voice inside you that tries to come up with a reason for you not to start today.

A voice inside you that wants to keep you from changing would come up with reasons like:

  • “I need more preparation and learning before I begin.”
  • “I don’t think there is enough opportunity”
  • “There is too much competition”
  • “I am not good enough for this kind of work”
  • “I am too tired today, I will do it tomorrow”
  • “I need to complete the other work that I started before starting new things”

The above reasons are the most common ones I have heard of inside my head. If I listen to this voice, then I cannot start. If you start thinking about it, you will be able to identify the thoughts that prevent you from starting.

So whenever I think of something, I just start it. It could be something as simple as tweeting about an idea. And then it takes a momentum of its own and adding more things on top of it becomes easier with time.

If I have a team of 10 people, adding the 11th member in the team is going to be very easy. If I have a blog with a monthly revenue of $5,000 and 50,000+ visitors a month, investing thousands of dollars in creating a product is going to be easy and natural.

None of growth would happen if I don’t start a blog. If I haven’t made my first information product. Built my first newsletter. Added my first subscriber.

The secret to big, great, amazing, awesome, massive success and all the other superlatives associated with success and entrepreneurship is not hard work. It’s not luck. It’s not who you know. It’s not getting funded. It’s not about finding the right team members. And it’s not about the right idea.

It’s about getting started. Today.

So tell me, are you going to start today?

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