It often seems to be the case that we stop working hard if we see no progress. I can certainly admit that I'm guilty of it myself. Society has taught us to run cost/benefit analyses on every action we perform, and make decisions based off of the results. If I were to put 10 solid hours of hard work into Steemit and end up with only a few cents, the most logical conclusion would be that I wasted 10 hours and should move on to something else more productive. It all makes sense except for one thing...
Successful people just don't follow logic.
Pick someone you would consider successful. Maybe you chose Bill Gates or Jeff Bezos or even Nelson Mandela. What do they all have in common? They didn't follow the paths that would lead to society's definition of success. Going by society's logic, Bill Gates should never have dropped out of college, Jeff Bezos should have never left a prosperous Wall Street job to start a company in his garage, and Nelson Mandela should have never taken part in revolutionary activity. Yet chances are that these illogical people will be the ones remembered for centuries, not the banker who makes 100k a year sitting behind a desk and not the web developer who makes his living parsing endlessly through big data.
What does any of this have to do with failure?
The fact is that many of these illogical decisions may seem like failures at first. It hurts inside to check Steemit and see that a post you put tons of work into got only one upvote (which just happened to be yourself). Every part of your being may tell you it is time to give up.
No.
It means that it is time to write another post.
And another one.
And another one.
And start working on that dtube video.
And start heading towards where you want to be. It is never time to take a break when you fail. Simply put, you don't deserve a break. When you keep working and working and finally get to something successful, you won't want a break anymore! Think of it as a car with a broken ignition: you need to push it up the hill first, and once you get to the top you can ride it down and let the car's motion down the hill start up the engine. The car may seem very heavy, and the hill very high; you might trip on a pothole and have the car slide back down the hill. Why bother trying again, why would the next try be any better than the last? You know where the pothole is this time.
Once you make it to the top and ride down with your engine running, the next hill will be much easier to climb!