“Comparison is the thief of joy.” – Theodore Roosevelt

You’re scrolling through social media and you notice a sponsored post, it’s a screenshot taken from the Shopify dashboard. It’s a chart you know well. The one that shows sales, week on week or month on month. The chart shows a massive upward trend and the headline shouts promises of Zero to 10k a month in 90 days.

You slowly start rolling that figure around your tongue, 10k ….$10,000 a month, feels good, heck yeah, feels great, you’re going to do that, and before you know it $10k a month becomes your sales goal.

With a fist pump and a boatload of caffeine, you jump in.

The Pitfalls of Copying Others’ Ambitions

But there’s a problem, this goal is someone else’s idea of success, and when you adopt others’ ideas as your own something strange happens. You start to notice how down you feel when month after month you don’t hit your big goal. Perhaps you’ve had a sale or two but your bank balance is lower than it was at the beginning thanks to the pricey software tools ‘needed’.

And the whole thing doesn’t feel right, something feels wrong, it all feels hard, an ongoing struggle.

The emotional and financial toll of chasing goals that don’t come from within you and don’t fit with your values or your business strategy are real, and can do serious damage if left unchecked for too long.

The Value of Small Goals

I had a coaching session with a client recently who told me her business goal was to go from her current $300 a month to $600 a month in online sales of her handcrafted stickers and stationery products. I could have thought to myself ‘aim higher! You can do so much better!’ knowing that her products were high quality and she had the right tech set-up behind her. However, I didn’t think that and the reason was, as we got talking, it became apparent that she had 2 small children under the age of 7, she had 3 short days a week to work on her business and she wanted my help to focus her efforts, in order to do less, not more.

Here was a client who understood her goals were small enough to stretch her whilst remaining within reach (I have an inkling that once she reaches her goal she’ll set a new one and reach new heights). The truth is small wins are essential for long-term success.

The Marketing Trap of Exponential Growth Claims

Let us return for a moment to those Shopify dashboard screenshots showing exponential growth. Shocker alert, they are never fully transparent, many of these screenshots are growth metics that have been manipulated using paid ads. In other words, a shit load of money spent on ads over a finite period of time just to get the inflated screenshot and claims that promise overnight success.

Have you ever heard the saying…

Turnover is vanity, profit is sanity

Wise words, especially if you’re in the first 5 years of your online ecommerce business.

To get that screenshot, the amount of money needed to show such fast growth would have wiped out any profit and, more likely made a loss.

Here are 3 tips to asses any offer that claims skyrocketing sales overnight… 

Ensure you know where the data comes from. 

A chart showing exponential growth may seem impressive, but was it achieved organically or through paid ads and large marketing budgets? If “organic” success involved significant ad spend, replicating that growth might be unrealistic.

Look for Fine Print or Missing Context:

A testimonial saying, “I doubled my revenue in three months!” sounds great, but what was the starting point? If initial revenue was $20 a month, the claim might be less impressive. Check for context or disclaimers that clarify how typical or achievable these results are.

Identify Unrealistic Promises:

Phrases like “guaranteed overnight success” or “the only strategy you’ll ever need” are red flags. Genuine strategies take time and are rarely one-size-fits-all. If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.

Conclusion

Sometimes we look outside of ourselves for guidance on business goals because we want to aspire to something really big, I get it, we want the level of success ‘that person over there’ has. Sometimes we’re just not confident enough to set our own goals so we look elsewhere for ideas and we start asking ourselves what goal ‘should’ I be setting?

There’s nothing wrong with setting goals that stretch you, whether it’s making enough money to pay the electricity bill or buy a rental apartment as long as those goals are your own and it’s what you want.

Look inside of you.

Write your goal down.

Take small steps every day toward it.

Celebrate the smallest of wins.

Give yourself time and compassion.

You’ll get there, I promise.