Quitting at the First Sign of Failure: A Reflection on Past Endeavors

Over the past three years, I have taken on the following pursuits:

Unfortunately, none of these endeavors grew as I had hoped, so I ended up quitting all of them.

With the ALIS blog, despite posting over 400 articles, the viewership didn't grow as much as I expected. The WordPress blog was similar—the effort didn't pay off proportionally to the posting costs.

My cryptocurrency investments yielded no profits, and my attempt to monetize on X also failed.

I believe the root cause was my lack of marketing skills. Simply providing information is not enough; attracting people's attention is crucial. This is something I need to work on improving going forward.

In fact, I was also posting illustrations on an SNS, but I had my account banned twice, which was quite demoralizing. The failure of my Discord community management due to the account bans further compounded my dejection. Fortunately, not everything was completely destroyed, so I want to cherish what remains intact and work towards a fresh start from here.

The Causes of Success and Failure

I believe that both success and failure stem equally from "taking on challenges." Where did you go today? What happened there? Everything results from the challenges you've undertaken—that's all there is to it.

My inability to earn on X, my cryptocurrency gains, my fan acquisition—all of these outcomes, including getting my accounts banned, happened because I took on those challenges. If I hadn't challenged myself, the account bans would never have occurred.

Of course, failures can be painful and take a severe mental toll. However, among all the failures I've experienced, the most mentally draining was "not challenging myself at all." When you're taking on a challenge, you don't even think about how it might affect your mental state. There's often debate about the merits of being idle, whether it's good or bad. But after a series of challenges, you lose sight of whether idleness is good or bad.

The only thing that's certain is that not challenging yourself at all is definitely not a good thing.

Don't Challenge Yourself Just for Money

That said, I don't think it's a good idea to take on new challenges primarily for the sake of making money.

All the endeavors I mentioned earlier were motivated by a desire to generate income, and I didn't find them particularly enjoyable for their own sake. Of course, not everything was boring, and money wasn't the only driving force, but at least having money as the primary motivation wasn't ideal.

I currently live overseas, outside of Japan, which is also a kind of challenge. Occasionally, I wonder if this move was motivated by financial considerations, but if I start thinking that way, it's probably better to quit and either move back or go on a trip, based on my previous failures.

At the very least, it seems that taking on challenges with a clear mind, without preconceived notions, is more likely to lead to success in the end. This is just a process of elimination, but it's my current perspective.

My Current Aspiration: Writing a Book

Finally, I'll share what I want to do now. In a previous post, I mentioned that my Discord community management had crashed and burned. The reason I wanted to manage a Discord community in the first place was simply because I had never done it before and saw other famous people doing it—a rather mindless, trend-following reason. In fact, about 90% of the challenges I've taken on have been motivated by similarly mindless, trend-following reasons.

What I want to do now, instead of running a Discord community, is to write a book. I've read quite a few books, and I thought it should be simple enough to publish one on a platform like Note. I'm considering writing a book of around 100,000 characters. I haven't decided on the content yet, but I'd like to write a casual, freeform book.

Ideally, it might be better to write a book after achieving some business success or reaching a certain stage in life. However, when would that be? The reality is that anyone can write a book. There's no rule against it, and it's not something we should impose arbitrary restrictions on ourselves about. If you want to write, just write. If you don't want to, then don't. It's as simple as that.

I've spent this whole time boasting about all the things I've quit, but unfortunately, I have no intention of quitting Note.