You know the idea that if you just work on something for 10,000 hours you will be great at it. Please check back with me in hour 9,999 and we’ll talk again. I’m less cynical about the number 1,000 and specifically an idea that it takes a thousand days to make your business work.

Any number is bollocks, really, so if you are on day 1 or day 999 and things don’t look like they’re on track, I wouldn’t lose sleep. But this is one of those ideas where the point of the number is not to plant a stick in the ground and say this is the finishing line. It’s to say that the finishing line is way over there, it isn’t on your first day or at the end of your first month.

Dan from TropicalMBA claims:

I was chatting with my friend David from Greenback Tax Services the other day about these misconceptions. I said: “people don’t understand they need to be poor for 1000 days.” Our basic hypothesis: you’ll be doing worse than you were at your job for 1000 days after you start your muse business. I’ve seen it happen a bunch of times. For many of us it’s been almost exactly those 1000 days it took for us to get back to the level of income we enjoyed in our corporate days.

The 1,000 Day Rule: What Living the Dream Really Looks Like

He then goes on to outline what many of those 1,000 days looks like on the way.