Mondays are my favorite days of the week. It’s the day I get to devote whole heartedly to my audiobook narration career. And if you’ve been following me for any amount of time, you know I’ve never felt more like myself than when I’m in the recording studio. So while others dread Mondays, I get up early. I begin my week with an entire day dedicated to my dream career. 

I’ve spent a lot of time complaining, much like other people who try to make their dreams come true. For a while I went through the motions only half heartedly trying. It wasn’t until I decided to go all-in that I started to see growth in my business and writing. I joined a writing program that was insanely expensive and honestly not worth the money for the training provided. BUT it did force me to focus and put the work into my writing career. That ultimately poured over into my narration business as well.

I found Mondays to be the perfect day to work intensely on both. So a typical Monday has me waking up early and having a productive morning. I’ll have some Turkish tea and bring a light breakfast to my office. For the first 5 hours of the day I’ll knock out multiple chapters of audio edits. The dogs will normally be chilling in my office with me and offer a few nice breaks between chapters. 

Then comes my favorite part of Mondays, studio time. It’s a good hour and half drive to the professional studio that I record at. I’ll schedule up to 3 hours of recording time in one sitting. That’s pretty much my max. After 3 hours, I’ll start to jeopardize my voice, and potentially lose my voice. Then it’s time to go home. By the time I get home I am dead to the world tired. It’s a brain intensive day so I allow myself to rest at the end of the day. A good reading time with the pups is always helpful at the end of the day. It gives me time to recover and be able to get back to work the next day.

How many hours do you think it takes me to edit 1 finished hour of audio? Well there’s an hour and half of recording time. Then about two hours per 15min chapter. On average it takes me 8 hours in editing so when it’s all said and done 1 finished hour of an audiobook is almost 10 hours of work. Does that seem long? Perhaps it is, but I do my edits manually instead of bulk editing software. Why? Because this gives me more control over the final product. My goal is to produce incredible high quality audiobooks, so I’ll go the extra miles and the extra hours to make your audiobook the best that it can be.

Mondays have been some of the best days I’ve experienced as a business owner. I love them because they are encouraging and give me a sense of control in my life. Mondays are all on me. There’s no outside boss telling me when I have to wake up and start work. My success is based on the work I put in. If I stick to my schedule, then I’ll succeed. But the opportunity and options make me feel better.

The thing I’ve found in writing and in business is that it really is a numbers game. The more you put yourself out there, the more likely you are to succeed. This secret helped take the pressure off. Because if it’s all about numbers: the more pages I write – the better my writing will be, the more people I reach with information about my business – the more people will be willing to purchase my services, then all I have to do is never give up. 

The more I put in, the more success I find. I started taking time off to go to writing conferences and book fairs to connect with authors in person. If I had simply gone and waited for authors to find me, I wouldn’t have been waiting a long time. I had to put myself out there. I had to search for those connections. So what can you do to grow your career, whether it be writing or a small business? Are you pursuing your dreams with the amount of obsession and passion that will actually give you the results you want? Or are you half in and sort of working toward your goals?

Whatever decision you make, whether you drop everything and run toward your dreams or if you settle in to make your dreams a side hustle, please take a serious moment to determine which you’d like to do. If you decide to pursue it obsessively and dramatically, give it 16 months. Most people can manage a year, but they won’t see growth by then. It’s after you’ve poured into it for an entire year, that you’ll start to see the growth. So give it 16 months before you reevaluate or try something new. If you refuse to give up, then success is inevitable. 

NO AI was used in the writing of this blog post.