Are You Afraid of Success?

By Mike Coday •  Updated: 03/29/21 •  2 min read

Does Success Scare You?

It’s an honest question, “Are you afraid of success?”

Honest questions are sometimes hard to answer honestly when the honest answer makes us feel uncomfortable.

It’s hard to build a long-term business on a lie … just like it’s hard to build a relationship, a marriage, or anything else worth having on a lie. The stress fractures will start to widen under the pressure of pretending like everything is okay. Eventually, the lies crumble and we’re left in a pile of brokenness.

So, let me ask you again, “Are you afraid of success?”

You Already Know

You already know that doing X,Y, and Z lead to success, but you struggle to clear your schedule enough to get to X … while Y & Z are nowhere in sight. For some of us, X is knocking on doors, making phone calls, or doing follow-up work.

We know for an absolute fact that whenever we do this work, good things always happen. And yet, here we are at the end of another week and you still haven’t done it. We say we want to be more successful, but we’re having a hard time taking action.

The Sure Signs

Somehow we managed to do everything else this week but X.

We ordered some important junk online, re-shuffled our filing cabinet, deleted all the old emails out of our inbox, and even called Grandma, but we didn’t do X. Every single time we meant to do it, something else came up and we closed out the day with another zero. These are the sure signs of procrastination.

They’re also the sure signs that whatever it is we’re purposely distracting ourselves from doing is exactly what we should be doing!

If you wake up in the morning and think, “I really should go back to that one neighborhood and follow-up with several of those people,” but you end up going to get your hair cut and a massage instead, that’s a sure sign you should have gone out to the neighborhood.

What we avoid is a sure sign we should be doing it!

Peace,
Mike

P.S. When the procrastination bug strikes you, what you do next decides whether you’re really afraid of success or not.

Mike Coday

Mike started selling roofs in '95 while working as a youth pastor at a small church in North Texas. A decade later he transitioned to speaking at industry conferences and training outside sales teams. Today, he works exclusively as the premier consultant to roofing company owners who are driven for growth.