There’s a lot of appeal in starting your own business. You make the decisions, you set the schedule, you decide how hard to work and are directly compensated for that.
When I quit my Wall Street job, I was determined to go out in the world, find my true calling, and never work a corporate job again. I had a romantic notion that I’d somehow throw caution to wind and the universe would manifest the path to me.
I travelled for seven months experiencing the world but when my savings started running out, I started to get anxious. When was my big break going to come? Isn’t someone supposed to be like “Hey you seem smart, want to be my business partner?”
Of course not! I was very naïve but since then have learned it’s going to take time to build a business. Potentially a long time… Like 5 to 10 years. And it will also take a plan.
Everyday I wake up and know I want to keep working towards financial independence and following my passions. But I realized most days I wasn’t actually doing anything to get closer to making that dream a reality.
Here are a few things to keep in mind to keep you moving in the right direction on your entrepreneurial journey:
Know your destination.
Get very clear on your outcome, the clearer it is, the more likely you are to achieve it. Taking a bunch of random actions in the hopes that one will randomly end in unexpected success is pretty foolish. That simply isn’t how success works. It takes time and focus to become successful; you can’t take random actions for a week and stumble into success.
With that said, heading in a direction without being totally sure of the destination can lead you to spot opportunities that you didn’t know existed before. From there you can recalibrate your goals and reach that newfound destination.
Know why you’re taking this journey.
Really work to understand why you chose the direction you’re heading in. What do you hope to have accomplished by the time you get there? What will succeeding mean to you on a personal level? What will it bring you that you don’t currently have now?
These are important questions because a lot of times we want conflicting things. If you want to spend more time with your family, launching a tech startup might not be the best route.
Once you’ve aligned your destination with your desires, you’ll experience less internal friction and become more focused on what you need to get done.
Set goals for different time periods.
Set monthly goals, weekly goals, and daily goals. It’s helpful to set up your next day before you go to sleep, that way when you wake up you know exactly what you need to do that day rather than expending energy trying to remember and schedule your day on the fly. You’re much less likely to make progress if you don’t have a plan for the day.
Break your goals down into tiny actions.
Goal #1: Make a million dollars. How likely is that to happen? Not very, it’s so obscure and so big you likely won’t even take action towards achieving it. But if you break that down to: get up at 6am—now you have something tangible you can build off of.
Figure out the right questions to ask.
If you’re totally new to something you aren’t going to be able to look at a finished product and know how to replicate it. For example say you need a website, but you know nothing about web design. The thought of getting a website built will be pretty daunting, so much so that most people abandon the dream there.
Use Google and YouTube as your teachers. Search “How to build a website” and start learning. When you get to a road block just figure out the question you have and ask Google again. Pretty soon you’ll realize that it’s actually pretty easy to launch a website without learning any coding!
Be consistent.
Small consistent action will trump big scattered actions. In finance there is a concept of compounding. This means that your investments grow exponentially with time. You’d be surprised how five minutes a day of consistent action will pay huge dividends ten years from now.
Find a system that works for you.
I find systems really, really helpful. A system is a way to schedule all the things that you need to get done into the time you have to do them. This can be fun to build, because you get to schedule things you enjoy doing and do them everyday. For example maybe your system goes:
-6am: Wake up and meditate for 15 min
-6:15am: Go for a walk
-6:45am: Write for 30 min
You want a routine in place in which you don’t spend energy in making a schedule for the day. When you wake up, it’s best to know what you’re going to do and when. This will maximize your productivity and give you a benchmark for whether you won the day or not. If you don’t have a plan, weeks will go by and you’ll realize you’re no closer to you goal than you were.
You don’t have to live by your system and it’s something you’ll modify with time. But I’ve found it really important to have a system as a baseline so if I ever get off track, I have something concrete to return to.
You only fail if you stop trying.
If you keep pursuing something and adjust course as you encounter obstacles and learn lessons. YOU WILL SUCCEED!
Even if you decide that you’re no longer interested in what you were pursuing and decide to quit, don’t underestimate the skills you learned along the way.
There’s been plenty of times where a failed attempt at a business has equipped me with skills that come in handy in other pursuits.
Whatever your pursuit may be, these steps will help you reach it. And always remember, it’s never reaching the actual destination, but rather about becoming the person who was able to reach that destination.