Avoid Demotivation When Starting A New Venture With The 1000-Day Rule

Avoid Demotivation When Starting A New Venture With The 1000-Day Rule

You’re about to quit your job to start a new business or pursue your dream career. You’re starry-eyed and full of hope, ready for an amazing adventure. According to productivity blog Tropical MBA though, you should probably expect to be doing worse than you are now for the first 1000 days.

Picture: Ludie Cochrane

While discussing the topic of muse businesses (though the principle is more widely applicable), Tropical MBA discusses the disruptive effect that happens when you take the plunge and start a new endeavour. Specifically, that for the first 1000 days, you are probably going to be worse off than you are now. If you’re used to making $40,000 a year right now, it will probably be just short of three years before you make it back to that level:

I was chatting with my friend David from Greenback Tax Services the other day about these misconceptions. I said: “people don’t understand they need to be poor for 1000 days.” Our basic hypothesis: you’ll be doing worse than you were at your job for 1000 days after you start your muse business.

I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times. For many of us it’s been almost exactly those 1000 days it took for us to get back to the level of income we enjoyed in our corporate days.

This bit of advice might sound discouraging, it’s actually uplifting in its own right. None of us take the risk of starting a new career or business in the hopes of gaining nothing, but it also means that period of being worse off is just a part of the process. If you still haven’t achieved success two years down the road, you haven’t necessarily failed. You’re just still making your way.

The 1000 Day Rule : What Living the Dream Really Looks Like [TropicalMBA via Rockstar Finance]


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