Yep, I tend to start things with enthusiasm and then discover they are "more work" than I thought. Sometimes I abandon them and sometimes I don't. It depends on the rewards/enjoyment ratio.
I'm just wrapping up a drop shipping business which, after 18 months of hard grind was finally turning pretty lucrative, but I didn't enjoy it at all so I decided to get out before I got attached to the money and it became harder to walk away. As it is, it's taken me since November to fully decide to let go of it.
As I've mentioned before Steemit is definitely hard going than I thought it would be. I think I'm getting a bit more used to that now.
It's hard when you're first here and see other people making good money without much effort (I think that's where the expectation comes from) but you gradually begin to see that they have either been here a long time or have invested in the platform.
So far the enjoyment of the conversations I'm having and the new stuff I'm learning is easily a big enough compensation to keep going.
Businesses you have invested a lot of time and effort in can be hard to let go of. I tend to err on the side of "holding on too long," rather than the opposite.
Drop shipping businesses can be hard because there are so many people trying to do something similar, so the profit margins are often small, and it takes a long time to get truly established.
I really had no expectations of Steemit when I came here... pretty much every bit I get here I consider a "bonus," compared to Facebook or keeping my own external blogs.