The Struggle is Real – ver 3000.01

I know that this slang expression is often used when someone is experiencing a difficult or frustrating situation, most often in a humorous or ironic way. However, it seems to be an all too often occurrence in the business world. We start a task that when we first envisioned it was going to be pretty much straight forward. Only to find out that when we were fully entrenched in the task there were more decisions that needed to be made in order to complete the task that we had never anticipated. 

This is where I found myself this week as I started what was supposed to be a straightforward task of creating an email opt-in form for my readers. I wanted to offer them a way that they could stay aware of any new posts, tips or just good valuable information that I could provide them and as a bonus to incentivize them to subscribe I wanted to give them a free training.

So, as I have stated that I would share with you all the Good, Bad and Ugly this seemed to fit the bill. Here’s how my struggle began, I started out by selecting a template to use where I could just add my own style and graphics without recreating the wheel. A pretty smart idea I thought, until I realized that I’ve never really created any of the graphics needed for branding my form or any other page. Ok, so not too bad of a problem, I’ll just head off to canva and create a banner logo and pop it into the form.  So I choose the size of banner I wanted to create, popped my Makin Cheddar Man in the banner and choose the blue background. Simple right? Wrong, after I looked at the banner it became immediately apparent that the blue background I had chosen wasn’t the same color as the blue in my logo. OOPS, how do I solve this? I looked for a tool to help me find the color number of the logo color, I went in and out of every menu time after time after time. Then I saw the Help field and entered “How to find the color number”. The help menu told me it was on the editor toolbar under colors, straight forward I thought. Where is the editor toolbar? Oh boy, I thought I should know all these things since I am somewhat computer savvy. The frustration was setting in! I sat back took a big breath and began to track my steps, wow there it was the long-lost tool. So I used the tool and got my Hex No# 0044ff and off to the races I went. Downloaded the file from canva and uploaded it to the header in my form, Wala!

So the next steps were to choose the fields I wanted to collect from the user. Oh No another decision I have to make, at least this one wasn’t as complicated, but I could feel the anxiety building. Now there are also some other features I wanted to add to the form to help my reader, but I have to start working on my new post that I promised to post weekly. Come on this is taking way to long I thought to myself. This is starting to sound like a time management weakness or maybe a perfectionist issue.

So to quote Tony Stark “To wrap it up and put a bow on it”, there will always be struggles throughout our journeys whether they are in an Online business or a Brick and mortar business. We just need to push through it and then sit back and figure out what our strengths and weaknesses are. That way we can work on using those strengths to our advantage and how we can strengthen our weaknesses to lessen the struggles.

Hopefully you have gotten some value from my struggle of the week. Please leave any comments about the struggles you have had or are having and hopefully I will be able to finish my email subscription setup for you by my next post or I may have to start version 3000.02.