Founders, it's time to leave comparison, strife, and fear behind to pursue your purpose.
I was a day late in publishing Well Purposed.
A busy couple of weeks have made their impact. Normally, this would have set my pulse racing and my anxiety levels rising.
But not this time.
This time, I am grateful for an opportunistic conversation yesterday.
We discussed the extent of comparison, fear, and striving within the entrepreneurial community.
Those starting out, with a seed of a vision, feeling inferior to established founders.
Established founders fearful of investor or stakeholder pressure, or that they are not growing at the expected speed.
Internal striving to reach goals, metrics, or internal perception of success.
“We tend to stack ourselves up against everyone else and pick ourselves apart based on what other people are doing. This practice does nothing to make us better” Cara Alwill Leyba - Girl Code
But here's the challenge.
We’re living in a world that’s changing faster than we realise, and it’s on us—the entrepreneurs, the dreamers, the doers and innovators—to step up and create solutions.
If we're caught in the trap of comparing ourselves to a few snapshots of someone else's life; which never truly reveals the full story of hidden failures, challenges and pain, we become distracted and less able to focus on our intended path and vision.
In other words, innovation stops.
The only healthy approach is to compare yourself to your past self. Reflect on who you are today versus who you were before, or assess your business’s current performance against its performance in previous days, weeks, months, or years.
This provides a realistic benchmark where you have sight of all the facts.
There are tools and techniques to help you with a mindset shift.
Understand that entrepreneurship is a personal journey. We're building different products, with different business models. Some models can be tackled with the 'fail fast fail cheap' approach, other ventures need founders to be present for the long haul. Personal circumstances vary as wildly as the individuals that are founders.
Journaling is your quiet companion. Not simply journaling, but benchmarking your goals and aspirations annually, broken into quarterly and weekly achievements is crucial to seeing progress. I use Full Focus Planner, but my top tip, is to find a tool that works for you.
Find a mentor. Look for real entrepreneurs in your network who you can talk to who are where you want to be, but are willing to be your mentor and share their journey with you, both with the challenges they’ve experienced as well as what they’ve learned along the way.
Know that we all face days when we feel we have achieved less than we should.
But if you dive into our journal, or grab a coffee with a mentor, rather than mindlessly scrolling in a bid to compare, you will be saner, stronger, and more focussed.
