The Results are in: Fail

If I were the boss of me, I would fire me!  If every person who has liked the Mixed in Different Shades Facebook page were to generate a dollar profit then I would have earned some 3,900 dollars profit from 18 months of live service – 216 dollars a month!  That’s way below minimum wage!  If each website visitor generated 10 cents, then the site would be earning less than 10 dollars a day, not good results considering not only the time commitment but the monetary investment as well.  To make matters worse, this hypothetical earnings are just that, hypothetical.

There was a great motivator, Jim Rohn, who insisted that one of the building planks for success was the regular measurements of results; “measured often to see if you are making progress” http://youtu.be/aUKNKsyR0nI.  Looking at what has been achieved in the last 18 months, I have to say that the results are not impressive.  Yes, I do have 3,900 Facebook likes but I expected 10,000+, yes, I have made interesting and useful connections that may serve me well in the future.  There is no YouTube channel with several ground-breaking videos which remain on the drawing board and the research tour, well that never took off due to financial and personal reasons.  To top it all off, the book is not complete!

Am I only realising the predicament I have placed myself into?  No, not really, by the time I returned from my ‘holiday’ in August, I owned up to my Facebook fans that I was returning to the job market and the project would now become a project of love, a hobby.  The return to the job market has not been the mitigating success either, it has been time consuming and very, very frustrating.  A work colleague once assured me that I had the skills and experience to walk into a new job, a fact that is now apparently not coming to fruition.

The decision to start a project like this was the catalyst to a series of major decisions affecting my life in the following months, issues that somehow conspired to sap my attention away from what I had set out to do.  This project was to achieve a lifelong ambition to write a book, it was to combine my love for history and science, particularly, genetics and inheritance into a lifestyle of learning and research, travel and exploration.  This would be my dream job!

As the year draws to a close, I must admit that the project has been a failure.  And yet, a return to a job holds no joy or inspiration for me.  In my line of work, it is very easy for the work to impact your life so intently that with other life commitments such as family and health, there is no time for ‘hobbies’, no time for ‘projects of love’.  I remember years ago constantly advising a young colleague whose work was suffering from his ‘project of love’ that you cannot serve two Gods at once.  MIDS is a project of love, a project in whose aims I still believe in and one that I continue to wish to pursue.

Am I feeling sorry for myself?  I don’t think so; maybe more disappointed.  It would be nice to make a new year’s resolution that would work out but life is not always like that.  Do I or don’t I continue with this?  Will this also end up on the scrapheap of the many previous failed projects?  Can I be happy with a mediocre MIDS and concentrate instead on a new job?

I have a lot of thinking to do.

Happy New Year and may your resolutions not be as hard as the one I must try to make.