When you first start a business, beyond the fear of failure and it’s repercussions
(socially, financially and mentally), you believe that your idea will pull you through
the entrepreneurial maze. Regardless of what the statistics say, you like to think that
yours will be one of the businesses that succeed. After all, if you thought otherwise
you wouldn’t have started, right?Starting a business is not easy. As such, optimism is a fantastic quality in any entrepreneur, especially when things aren’t going the way that you planned for them to. However, if you have unrealistic expectations for your business, it can be hard to negotiate your optimism and energy with reality. Often this can lead to lots of disappointment and skipping ahead when you haven’t laid the groundwork for what you are doing properly.
It’s important to realise that once you’ve optimistically skipped ahead, it’s harder to go back as you want to keep progressing forwards, not falling backwards. Thus, as enthusiastic and optimistic as you are, you need to be grounded in the reality of here and now from day one.
This might sound incredibly difficult. Everyone has big dreams for their businesses, but growth doesn’t happen in day. If you look back to our blog post on effective goal setting this might give you a better idea on how to plan out your longer term goals (the exciting things thatyou want to skip ahead to!) and the shorter term goals (the things that youneed to do in order to get the exciting stuff!) and help you to more effectively measure your impact and the success of what you are doing. Having consistent meetings, deadlines, and impact reports will help to keep your mind focused onthe reality of the day-to-day whilst helping you to build towards the future that you believe in.
Like Eleanor Roosevelt said –“The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams.”
Posted by: One Planet Ventures
