Truth and Consequences and Following Your Dreams

This Truth and Consequences article is a candid sharing on our personal and professional growth challenges. So if you’re not familiar with the iCreateDaily brand and creators, fair warning, this may not interest you, however, it is a lesson and message that many creators can relate to on some level.

These past couple years I’ve been dedicating most of my time to creating content for the iCreateDaily website and community, over our other monetizing websites. You know, the ones that pay the bills. Subsequently, they, as well as our ecommerce store of journals, have suffered the downtrend of neglect.

To give you an idea, I have a friend who has a gardening website that was a smaller site (less articles and traffic) than ours and a smaller social audience, than our gardening site a couple years ago. She began focusing on it consistently above all else, and the result is that two years later, her site is earning about 20x the amount of ours. 

20x the revenue of our gardening website!!!  Now THAT would not only pay the bills, but there would be profit left over to fund the growing of the iCreateDaily vision. So NOT focusing on the work that sustains us versus that which feeds my soul — and hopefully yours and others — has inhibited my ability to fund this dream to its own sustainable fruition.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job!!!

This is why creators seeking to earn a living from their craft shouldn’t quit their “day job” until their passion work is sustainable on its own. Nor should I have neglected our monetizing endeavors… work which I also love and am glad and grateful to do. 

With iCreateDaily I am COMPELLED TO, even if it’s forever non or only minimally monetizing. However, the vision for this is grand and will be shared more in another article soon.

However, we started this with two of us and now it’s just me. That, plus my husband, Coleman – our master gardener — is now less involved in our gardening website as his own investment business has grown. So I’m now doing the work of about 5 people alone, and thus doing a poor job of it on all fronts. I’m hiring VA’s but that also requires a vetting and training period that takes more time up front, and of course an added cost as well.

This isn’t a complaint. I love this work. It’s just facts and physics. And there’s only so much that any one person can do alone. One of our favorite authors and thought leaders is Benjamin Hardy, and he co-authored a book with the entrepreneur’s coach, Dan Sullivan, titled, ‘Who, Not How‘, that beautifully guides us through how the way to achieve our dreams is to ask and implement “who’s” over “how’s”.

More Complexity

The other factor is that as the marketplace becomes more competitive and new technologies emerge, all systems are becoming more complex. Now, to be successful in any online endeavor requires that you learn the systems, how to use them and then to implement and manage them. I’ve written more on this in an article titled: The Knowledge of the World at Your Fingertips… a Modern Quandary of Accessibility and Complexity.

Even if you have the budget to outsource it all, many things inevitably fall through the cracks in terms of completeness and quality without the visionary involved and aware of what’s being done. So while we don’t have to know it all, we do need to monitor and understand it all, at least until we can hire an exceptional project manager who gets our vision and can replace us to be more free to devote our time to creating.

Never Underestimate The Power Of Focus

It’s also why we should FOCUS… FOCUS… FOCUS… on the 1 (or 2 things — if we MUST do more than the one) that will sustain stability, so that from that solid foundation we can build the galleries of our dreams.

RELATED: Your one thing needs to become your primary mental focus… your obsession, in order to bring it to fruition.

This Helen Keller quote sums this pursuit up nicely:

“Be happy with what you have while working for what you want.”
~Helen Keller, American author, disability advocate, 1880-1968

More to come soon.

LeAura Alderson

Hello! I’m LeAura, owner and co-creator of iCreateDaily.com®.  As an autodidactic philosopher, generalist, personal development advocate, entrepreneur, writer, editor, author, ideator, media publisher, and podcaster, I’m passionate about helping others achieve their best possible life! Our small family of entrepreneurs, writers, investors, educators and creators own and run websites around topics we enjoy, such as gardening, health and fitness, creativity and pets, with more to come.

While my greatest teacher is Life… my formal training includes certifications in mediation, fitness, and strategic intervention coaching, including marriage and family. Today, the synergy of creating websites, articles and podcasts, brings together all my favorite things: family, learning, growth, creating, connecting and contributing. To share these with you is a privilege, that serves my lifelong aspiration to help others.

My personal areas of creativity are in writing, masterminding, ideation, synthesis and bringing ideas to life through business and entrepreneurship, all with a pervasive spiritual foundation with a focus on elevating the lives of others.