Being an entrepreneur is a funny old life.
And for the record, you don’t have to own a bricks and mortar offline business to be an entrepreneur. A friend once told me that she believed not all self-employed people are entrepreneurs. “To be an entrepreneur, you have to own actual buildings”, she said.
I say that’s rubbish! Being an entrepreneur is a state of mind. A way of operating in the world. A view point. I was an entrepreneur long before I ever owned my own business.
Most of all, I suspect it’s about having a mind that sees opportunities. Generates ideas. Imagines possibilities.
That’s why so many of us have multiple businesses or projects. It’s impossible for us to have just one idea and stick to that.
Between you and I, it drives my husband potty.
“Why can’t you just pick one thing and stick to it?”
And I can, sort of.
But there always seems to be this flux between ‘this is the most wonderful thing I ever dreamed up’ and ‘this is a total pile of rubbish. I can’t believe I even thought this was possible!’
It’s just the nature of the beast and instead of fighting it, I’ve learned to acknowledge it and make no business or life changing decisions on the ‘this is total poop!’ days.
TITP days, as they shall from hence forth be known, require careful handling, kindness, lots of cups of tea and either ‘Blink’ or ‘The day of the astronaut’ (depending on where I am in my current re-run fest.)
Work can be done on TITP days but it needs to be the kind of work that doesn’t require too much thinking. Self-analysis is definitely not recommended on TITP days! 😉
But do you know what the best medicine is for those days?
Taking time to celebrate the small wins.
Did you just roll your eyes? Shame on you! 😉
I know, you’ve heard it before. The advice to keep a swipe file of nice emails and kind comments is not new. But did you ever actually do it?
My friend Stacy and I were chatting about this a couple of days ago. I’d had an email that had totally made my day. She had too. (And no, we didn’t just send each other an email!)
“How lucky are we that we get to have emails like this? We get to do stuff that actually has the potential to make a difference to someone else.”
I agreed with her of course.
But it’s so easy to negate that stuff. To get drowned by the TITP days. To allow ourselves to forget. Out of sight, out of mind, remember?
It’s time to start celebrating the small stuff, delighting over the little wins and really appreciating what a wonderful opportunity is in front of us.
You are brilliant and every time you step into the world, you have the choice to make it a more wonderful place.
You’re out there, shining your little light, never giving up, keeping on keeping on. And for that, you need to give yourself a standing ovation from time to time.
God delights in the little stuff. Jesus said every hair on your head is accounted for (which in my dad’s case wouldn’t take too long but it’s ok, he loves the attention) so maybe it’s time for us to follow God’s lead and start partying with the small stuff too.
Are you game? It’s easy, all you have to do is start.