One of the biggest challenges facing a person who wishes to improve in business or their personal life is naiveté.
It's hard to mentally conceptualize what success and failure look like. If you're going to do sales, for instance, it's hard to get your mind around how tremendously successful you can be even with very poor ratios of initial contact to closed sale.
Most people are overly optimistic in general about endeavors they jump into while untrained. But, perhaps much worse than that is believing in consistent improvement and gains.
The mind loves consistent improvement and gains, and hates random and erratic gains. This is one reason why video games can be so much more compelling than real-life mastery: real-life mastery has long plateaus -- even backslidings -- followed by breakout improvements that are unpredictable.
When you start training for success or initiating a business campaign, it's tempting to think the gains will be smooth and consistent. Not so. You'll probably have a great week at some point where you make tremendous insanely large gains, and you'll probably have a run of a few weeks in a row where nothing is clicking.
Experience helps with this, as does observing the internal workings of a business or training regime when you're younger -- if you were so fortunate as to have that. But if you don't have that, it's worth speaking with people who have gotten good at what you want to get good at, and asking them what the trajectory of success looked like for them.
If you ask a few people with a good memory who are reflective, you can start putting together realistic expectations for your own progress and successes. Tremendous wildly successful things are possible if you keep going and persevere during down or stagnant times, and coming in with a prepared mindset lets you do just that.