I remember going to the gym for the very first time.

I had dreams of becoming super buff in less than 3 months and every week, I looked in the mirror, disappointed with the results I was seeing.

I couldn’t see the incremental progress, because I was too close to the fire. I wanted to be buff FAST. I didn’t want to, and I didn’t notice myself, gaining a tiny bit of muscle every single day.

I was blinded by the promises of 6 pack shortcuts, buff guys who have been training for YEARS, selling a program to look “just like them” in just a couple months.

Little did I know, that the human body has biological limits on how fast we can gain muscle.

As a guy, I could only gain about 1-2 pounds of muscle every MONTH. That’s right. That’s 2 pounds every MONTH, and I was expecting to gain 5, or even 10 pounds per month which is nearly 2 pounds per week.

I wanted fast progress, instead of settling in for the long haul.

You can probably guess what happened.

I ended up not following through with the program, being disappointed with my results, and coming back to it time and time again, only to repeat the same exact mistakes.

And 2 pounds per month might not seem like a lot, but if I consistently worked out, ate right, and slept well for a year, I would gain 12-24 pounds of muscle.

After a month of progress, I would look very similar to how I looked when I started, but after a year, I would be nearly unrecognizable.

Many of us overestimate how much progress we can make in a week or a month, but underestimate the progress that we can make in a year or 5 years.

And this doesn’t just apply to the gym.

How many people do you know who jump from opportunity to opportunity, certain that THIS IS THE ONE, and never end up going anywhere?

They see people who have worked for YEARS to get to where they are now, and they want to be at the same place where those people are, but without putting in the same amount of work.

One concept related to this, is called $0/hour work. (Which is an article by Billy from ForeverJobless linked in the description below.) (Billy has a lot of unique ideas, so I recommend you check out his blog.)

The basic idea is this:

When you’re just starting a business, you might have to put in dozens, or even hundreds of hours, before actually getting paid.

You might have to research the target market, figure out their true needs, create the right solution, prototype, experiment, and break barriers to solve the problem that people have.

Someone who you see earning hundreds of thousands of dollars online, might have spent months, or even years, on figuring out how to solve the problem they’re solving to make that money.

Or maybe they had to spend months on figuring out how to build an audience, or how to find the right audience.

Either way, it doesn’t matter.

What matters is that most people aren’t willing to do this $0/hour work, and most people aren’t willing to think long term.

So… What does this all mean for you?

If you are able to overcome your natural tendency to be drawn to short-term gains, you might lose out on money NOW, but it’s likely that you will be better off in the long-term.