There are moments when I look at what other people are doing and wonder if I should be doing something completely different.
I’ll see someone selling something fairly ordinary and doing well with it.
I’ll see someone on TikTok sharing good messages and getting thousands of views consistently.
And sometimes, very briefly, I wonder:
Am I doing something wrong?
But when I actually sit with that question, I usually know the answer.
I haven’t given what I’m building enough time yet.
Sometimes the most important thing we can do is give our ideas time to grow before deciding what they are capable of becoming.
Over the last week, I’ve created several new websites. Some are ideas I’ve been carrying for a while, and others emerged because I followed curiosity when it appeared.
They exist now.
They have names.
They have structures.
They have a place in the world.
But most of them are still at the skeleton stage.
They’ve been planted.
And there’s an important difference between planting something and discovering whether it can grow.
Sometimes We Judge the Seed Before It Has Even Broken the Soil
It would be very easy for me to create a website, publish a few things, receive very little traffic and decide:
This isn’t working.
Then move on to something else.
And then something else.
And then something else.
But that would mean I was never really testing any of the ideas.
I was only testing how quickly they could reward me.
A real experiment requires more.
Content has to be created.
Products have to be developed.
Search engines have to discover pages.
Pinterest pins have to circulate.
People have to encounter the work.
Some sites need affiliate products.
Others may eventually lead to books, resources, digital products or communities.
And then, after enough activity and enough time, I can actually look at what happened.
Not what I feared might happen.
Not what happened for somebody else.
What happened with my work.
Comparison Can Make Everything Feel More Urgent Than It Is
I noticed this today after looking at one of my TikTok posts.
It had 274 views.
Not particularly impressive by TikTok standards.
But one person left a thoughtful comment.
She engages with my work regularly, and reading what she wrote made me feel emotional.
Because somebody had actually received what I was trying to communicate.
One person had stopped.
One person had reflected.
One person had felt something.
And strangely, that gave me more motivation to continue than looking at a larger number ever could.
Views tell me how far something travelled.
A comment can sometimes tell me whether it landed.
Those are not the same thing.
I’m Learning That Everything Doesn’t Need to Be Rescued
I think there has been a pattern in my life where excitement can quickly become urgency.
I become inspired.
I see possibility.
I want to build.
And then the mind starts moving ahead of the actual process.
How successful could this become?
How quickly could it grow?
Should I be doing something else instead?
But there is nothing I need to rescue right now.
There is no emergency.
The most important thing in my life at the moment is the wellbeing of myself and my partner.
Everything else can grow around that.
That changes the way I want to build.
I don’t want to create a business that requires me to constantly override myself in order to maintain it.
I want something flexible.
Something that can survive changes in location, energy, routine and circumstances.
Something that remains when I need to rest.
Websites do that.
Writing does that.
Books do that.
Ideas that have finally been turned into tangible things do that.
And there is something deeply reassuring about realizing:
This exists now.
I can return to it tomorrow.
I can add to it next week.
I can nurture one part when I feel drawn to it and another part later.
The work doesn’t disappear because I stop looking at it for a day.
Maybe Building Something Is More Like Gardening Than Manufacturing
I keep returning to the image of planting seeds.
When you plant a garden, you don’t dig everything up the next morning because nothing has appeared yet.
You water it.
You observe it.
You notice which plants respond.
You adjust the conditions.
You learn what needs more light.
You discover what grows easily and what needs more attention.
Some things flourish unexpectedly.
Others never really take.
But you can’t know any of that on the day you plant them.
And perhaps that is where I am now.
Not at the stage of deciding whether the garden failed.
At the stage of tending it.
To give your ideas time to grow means resisting the urge to keep digging them up just to check is something is happening beneath the surface.
The Question I Want to Remember
The next time I see somebody else succeeding and immediately wonder whether I should change direction, I want to ask myself:
Do I actually have evidence that what I’m doing isn’t working — or am I reacting to someone else’s visible success before I’ve given my own work enough time to grow?
Sometimes a new direction is exactly what we need.
But sometimes the bravest thing is much quieter.
Stay.
Water what you planted.
Give it sunlight.
Keep learning.
And see what grows.
I’m learning to give my ideas time to grow before asking them to prove themselves.
