One of the key traits of anyone who becomes successful in any field is that they had the persistence to keep practicing and getting better, over the long term. Whether it is a successful business person or Olympic athlete, it took a long time to build up the skills and experience to compete at the highest level.
Same things applies to anything new that you take on in your life. It is going to take a while to build up skills before you see results. This is one of the hardest parts of achieving success. You have to have the patience to wait for results.
Let's use the example of building a business based on growing an email list. You need a good sized list before you can expect to make any consistent sales. However, building a list and getting them to know, like, and trust you takes time, especially if you can only devote a few hours a week to the project.
If you already had the skill on how to build a list and lots of money to spend on paid advertising, you could add 1,000 subscribers to your list every week. Most people don't start out that way, so it could take a year to build that 1,000 person list.
You have to have a lot of patience to keep putting in the hours for an entire year to accomplish your list building goal. It is even harder if you are watching other people grow their lists much faster than you.
This is why it is important to realize that you cannot measure your progress on your goals against other people. Different people all have varying situations that affect their results. You have to just focus on being the best YOU possible.
If you are constantly focused on trying to measure yourself against someone who has a lot more time and money to devote to their list building, then you will always feel bad about how you are doing. This puts you in a situation where quitting sounds easier than continuing to work on your goal.
Instead of measuring yourself against others, try to always "better your best". How did you do last month? Can you do better than that this month? If you keep getting better, then you will eventually be someone that others look up to. You need the patience to keep working at it for as long as it takes to get to that point.
