Small Steps Everyday

image: everythingetsy.com

On Saturday three things happened that depressed me and made me feel like I wasn't making good enough progress. The first was that I came across an article online, http://www.latimes.com/projects/la-fi-farms-immigration/, about how farmers in the US are begging unemployed people to accept $16/hr to pick grapes on their farms and are still unable to find people willing to take up their offer. Why should that make me sad? That rate is equal to N57,600/day for a 8 - 5 work at N400/$. For the type of job you will get someone to do for you here at N3,000/day. It then made sense to me why their graduates expect $40/hr upwards for the same job an American company in Nigeria is paying the equivalent of $10/hr for same or even better skilled graduate. 

I was sad, though, for a more selfish reason. I have been offering my services at a ridiculously low price and need to do something urgently about it. I have to charge way higher than I currently do, for my professional services or I will always be earning the equivalent of an uneducated unskilled labourer's  salary in the US and be worse of than everybody who emigrates to USA.

The second was that I seem to be getting the short end of most consulting deals I get. My terrible negotiation skills. While other people go into consulting and make huge money from it, I seem to be barely making enough from it. I am going to have to force myself to make very difficult decisions to get out of that rot.

The third was that I met my gym friend again at night in the gym. He is trying to raise hundreds of thousands of dollars for his startup. He has gotten the attention of over a dozen investors and had been doing a lot of investor pitch/meeting lately. I do not envy him as I avoid external funding and would like to grow my business purely from getting customers to pay services I render (profit). But that Saturday discussion we had made me realise how far I still am from a scalable product and how slowly I have been progressing. I have my hands into too many tasks for other people. Too many people are trying to bring me into their business as technical partners and it is sucking my time and taking me away from my own big plans. 

So now I am taking small daily steps in fixing it all. I am slowly getting rid of the wrong attentions. Then I am daily upping my skill in the areas required for building scalable products. And finally, I am trying to get out of partnerships that are not doing me any good, opportunity cost wise.

It is the only way I can prevent being irreparably demotivated. Rather than looking for big radical changes, I can take small steps everyday in the direction of where I really want to be.