We all face similar problems in life, and entrepreneurs and business owners are no exception. At certain moments, doubts can creep in about what we believe we can achieve. Whether you want to start your own business or radically change your life, remember that you’ll go through the same problems and obstacles as anyone else who embarks on the same adventure.
The only difference between one person and another is how they handle events, obstacles and early success. Here are some ideas and lessons you should never forget.
1. We’ll all hit an obstacle and feel we’ve reached our limit.
Limits are part of life, although in most cases they aren’t limits at all but speed bumps. It’s practically impossible not to reach a point where everything suggests we’ve stalled, and in many cases that ceiling appears right at the start.
They’re just challenges, but let’s try to see them as a speed bump.
When you’re driving and you see a speed bump ahead, what do we usually do? We slow down, go over it carefully and carry on.
When you drive many miles, speed bumps are just another part of driving, a routine that’s part of the journey.
The same happens in business, and in personal and professional growth. We’re going to come across speed bumps that will temporarily force us to stop and take extra care. There’s no point getting out of the car, cursing the speed bump or complaining about it. You simply have to get over it and keep going.
It may seem an absurd comparison, but successful business people are so used to obstacles that, for them, speed bumps are already part of their professional routine.
Learn to see it that way. When we face an obstacle in business, all we have to do is slow down and look at it from a different angle. We work out a new strategy if needed to get past it, and we carry on until the next speed bump. And take it for granted that you’ll come across more of them.
2. A winning mindset.
When you go to a job interview, you’re not going there to take part. You’re going there to get the job. Successful people have that mindset of going out to win, and they take great care with their inner dialogue, with thoughts like “I can do it” or “I’m going for it and I’ll do everything I can to make it happen.”
The way you think can make all the difference, because as the saying goes: “Whether you think you can or you think you can’t, you’re right.”
This isn’t about motivational talk. From a scientific point of view, defeatist thinking focuses the brain on everything negative and cancels its ability to see its surroundings clearly. Positive thinking and non-limiting beliefs, on the other hand, help the brain find solutions and give it impressive creativity for solving problems.
3. You need to make risk your comfort zone.
Without exception, great business people, or anyone who has achieved something important, have something in common: they have left their comfort zone. Not only that, they have become so comfortable outside it that they have turned risk, uncertainty and fear into their comfort zone.
While most people feel comfortable in their everyday routine, routine kills the kind of people who achieve great things in life.
And yes, we know uncertainty is scary and makes us uncomfortable. But it’s an essential part of personal and professional growth, and above all of growth in the business world.
Ask yourself this: what would you do if you weren’t afraid and you knew for sure that the decision would turn out well, with no risk at all? Would you do it? Then do it.
4. Get rid of vague goals.
If anything has been proven, it’s that vague goals produce vague results.
A vague goal is “I’m going to write a book”, “I’m going to lose weight” or “I’m going to make my business an even bigger company”.
When are you going to start writing the book? Set a start date and a deadline so you can see your progress. How are you going to grow your business? What strategy are you going to use?
Some people will tell you not to set goals or deadlines for meeting them, because when you miss a goal you’ll get frustrated.
I couldn’t disagree more.
First: if you already expect to miss the deadlines, that’s how it will end up.
Second: if we can’t measure progress, we can’t manage it or improve it.
Third: it’s better to be frustrated at not reaching a goal (a sign that you were chasing it) than to be happy believing you’re doing something when in fact you’re not making progress and aren’t on track to achieve it.
Define what you want, draw up a strategy and a timeline, and go after it. There’s no other way.
5. Be clear about your why.
People who find it easier to achieve their goals tend to be very clear about why they want to achieve them. When you have a very strong “why”, it gives you a renewed sense of purpose and the motivation you need to keep going.
I’ve often noticed that many people who want to become professional musicians have the wrong “why”: fame, fans, fame, fame and more fame. That’s why most of them never get past the threshold of sacrifice it takes to go far in the music world.
Why do you want to get fit? When the reason is health, it’s a powerful reason that keeps reminding you to exercise. When the reason is “to pull” or to be more attractive to others, once you find a partner or get married you might stop exercising. That’s where the physical neglect some people fall into right after getting married often comes from.
And it’s the same in business. Do you want to grow your business to make more profit? As Richard Branson says, a business that only makes money is a bad business.
Change the way you think and start using the word “help”. If your product or service helps people, and you set out to help more people with it, you already have a valuable purpose. In those cases, the money follows.
If a goal doesn’t connect with certain values, you’ll often hit the speed bumps as if they were giant walls.
Do you think Steve Jobs’s sacrifice was about selling more iPhones and computers? Steve Jobs, both for Apple fans and for his detractors, had a more important goal than that: he firmly believed he was changing the world. And he has been a very important part of the great advances made in recent years.
The fact that today we have a laptop or a personal computer could be thanks to Steve Jobs, since one of his “speed bumps” was precisely hearing over and over: “Why would anyone want a computer?”
So when we are absolutely clear about our why, we wake up with a renewed sense of purpose.
Featured image: Chicken4War, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
