Sacrifice Must Hurt
Damn, this making money thing is actually really hard.
By Niklas Göke
After four years of working like a madman to survive as a self-employed creative, it first dawned on me that, “Damn, this making money thing is actually really hard.”
For most of my life, I had been told that I was special, mostly for having an above-average IQ and getting good grades with little effort. Now that I had stepped into an arena I had no experience in, and where the audience didn’t care one bit about who you were, only what you could do for them, it was clear that I was not special, nor would my talent magically carry me to the heights I had once been so sure I would reach.
I always knew that success takes hard work and diligence, and I quickly adjusted to both of those after choosing my own career path, but what I didn’t know and wasn’t prepared for was the amount of sacrifice greatness demands. So. Much. Sacrifice. And I wasn’t even halfway where I hoped to go yet!
That lesson first registered with regards to making money, perhaps because that was the most immediate task on my plate. If you start from scratch, you can’t just make a million dollars in six months and go lie on the beach for the next five years. That’s not how it works. Four years in, I finally realized — and accepted — that…
