This Is The Most Important Lesson I Learned While Building My Career

Your Intentions do not matter one bit. What matters are the results you get with the actions that you take.

We all have the exact tools we need for the job.

We have the Nails, the Hammers and the Wood to construct our careers.

However, most of us focus on the completely wrong things.

At the beginning we may be very motivated to build a patio.

We pick up the first couple of planks and start moving them to the back of the house.

We take out the design we made, take a look at what other people have done to build their patios, and our intention for the day is to get a good start on ours.

A couple days go by like this before we notice that someone else has a built a completely different, better-looking patio that they started in a different way.

We put down the hammer and take a closer look at what they are doing, questioning whether we should not copy their idea and path.

So we take a little break and think about our next plan, promising that tomorrow we will get more work done.

The next day we change our idea, take out the planks we placed and put them in a new way.

And so time flies away.

We spend time thinking of better and better ideas, designing one patio after another, getting all the best tools for the job, telling our friends about it, and doing everything but the actual work.

At the end of the month we wake up, take a look at our patio and realize we haven’t gotten anything done.

Building our careers is similar.

We focus on the wrong things that do not matter, plan too much and do too little, and do every smaller task, just to avoid the couple important, but uncomfortable, tasks that matter.

When I built my career I tried it all.

I tried starting a YouTube channel, thinking that this is how others succeed.

I went on Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter.

I spent months building an amazing website, designing a course and writing a book.

I worked out, woke up early, wrote more answers than anyone else and tried everything possible to get more clients.

But I didn’t get on any calls.

Focused so much on the background work I completely ignored the one thing that actually mattered and it took me way too long to realize it.

After about 2 years of working long, hard hours I had 3 clients.

My results did not reflect the amount of work I put in because my work was not placed in the right place!

If you want to build your career you have to focus most of your energy on the thing that actually matters.

Don’t bother with all the small, surrounding tasks.

Yes, they do help, but they’re not what counts!

When you build a patio what matters is that you place the planks.

If the results don’t reflect your work you’re working on the wrong things!

And no matter how much you do, no matter how good your intentions, no matter how hard you grind, it’s only the results that really matter at the end.

Originally published at http://quora.com.