This note was first ment to be a longer blog post. Then I turned it into an email sent out to my subscribers. Now I am also posting it on the blog if some business owner finds it useful. Good luck! Lan
You get your hopes up about something new you are working on and you become disappointed when it doesn’t work as well as you hoped.
The last time I was disappointed was when our email sequence was not working as I had hoped.
I saw this as a failure.
Thankfully, my mentor pointed out some important lessons.
It was our first version.
Can you really expect something to work out of the box?
It can work yes. And it’s great when it does.
But sooner or later there will be situations when it won’t.
And the worst thing then is to accept it as a failure and stop.
This is where it becomes important to know that you have not failed, you just found something that doesn’t work.
Switch perspective.
Now we have 1000 new people on our mailing list we can learn from, try to help them, hear from them.
We have their attention and the right to address them.
We can test things.
This is a huge deal for us!
Now instead of feeling bad about not working as well as I HOPED (hope is always a bad strategy), we can go forward and think about what we can do now to go forward.
Our next step is creating a live event (one of the perks if you have a local audience).
We will take around 50 those that signed up (some old customers, mostly new) for a hike to some beautiful authentic villages, prepare some local food, meet with them, talk with them, get to know them and they will get to know us.
We can afford to do that because we are a boutique travel company. Meaning we don’t have many tours and guests and high lifetime value.
The strategy always depends on the goals and possibilities.
But the point is to switch your perspective from failures, wins, ups and downs to “Getting everything you can out of all you’ve got”.
You should not build clouds in the sky. It often ends up in disappointment.
Stop thinking about what you should have done already, where you should be and being eternally unsatisfied.
No.
Stay focused on the path that takes you to the goal.
And not the goal itself.
It’s the same when you are driving, you are watching the road, you don’t look in the distance for 100 kilometres (cca. 60 miles) to see the goal.
And you don’t look at the steering wheel all the time and check If everything is all right.
If you have enough gas and the motor is functioning.
Don’t be like the guy that is running out of gas on the highway and when he is reminded about refuelling, he says he has no time.
Accept where you are now.
Everything is exactly as it should be.
Continue, grind, work, enjoy, create, develop.
You are not here on this world to have wealth and success flow down on you just like that.
Or 100 rich clients beg you to take them on a tour.
You are here to grow. To serve.
Success will follow.
But why couldn’t 100 rich clients just come to me?
You are probably not ready.
Master appears when the student is ready.
This saying means there is a logical sequence of events.
When you know how to ask the right questions, you will find the mentors, the people that will take you further.
They will show up.
In all areas of your life.
Business and non-business.
When you are ready for the leap forward.
You are maybe saying to yourself: “Things should happen already, I am ready, I am doing everything right.”
But no, you are not.
Something is missing.
Keep looking.
You don’t yet know what it is.
Maybe it’s something different as you are thinking now.
Just think about if you got sick, how quickly your goals would change.
What doesn’t change that often is “how you would like to feel while pursuing your goals”
The first Slovenian on mount Everest said “Who is searching for the goal will remain empty when he finds it. But he who finds the path will be carrying the goal with him at all times,”
Think about this.
If you are not enjoying on the path, you are doing it wrong.
I am not saying every minute should be fun.
But a general sense of wellbeing should be present.
Otherwise, you need to work more on your mental attitude.
Because you are risking burnout.
Think about this.
There is a saying that Edison had to test 10,000 different materials before he found the right one to use to create the light bulb.
The exact number doesn’t matter, it was a lot.
Just imagine Edison at experiment number 600 (a lot of experiments already) saying to himself.
“Come on, this now has to work. I’ve been through 600 materials. I need this to succeed so I can finally breathe, so I can finally be happy about where my business is at ….”
What kind of horrible life would be to go through 9400 more? That would be pure torture, every experiment would be an agony.
If Edison was not in the “now”, not thinking about anything else but the joy of the challenge, that would be the worst life ever.
So life is a laboratory.
Your business, relationships.
Just stop and think.
You are going through 1000s and 1000s of experiments.
Hoping to “succeed”. If you don’t enjoy, living in the now, experimenting, you are very, very screwed.
If you come back to our case.
50 people will join us at a live event. This live event is an experiment.
If it doesn’t work, we will try something else.
We are also working on different strategies.
And it comes from what my client/partner is good at and enjoys.
Follow your strengths.
Go forward.
Acknowledge the situation and enjoy the next challenge.
Lan
