One of my birthday presents was a fun little book called “The Quotable Intellectual.” I love little insightful witticisms and it’s a fun book to browse through when I need a moment to clear my thoughts or feel inspired.
Today I found this one, and I thought it was pretty great:
It’s something I’d also read about in another one of my ongoing reads – Succeeding as an Entrepreneur. The question we all seem to forget about almost instantaneously after starting a business:
why am I doing this + what is the end goal?
Sometimes, it’s to build up a corporation that you can sell for big bucks. Other times it’s to build up a business where you can hire employees to do the bulk of the work and sit back and be the manager – from the golf course perhaps.
For the rest, it’s more of a lifestyle thing. Running your own business has some major perks — flexibility to make your own schedule, the ability to decide how much you want to work (maybe it’s more part-time for you, for example), control over the money and the direction the company grows in.
In order to make any of the above options happen, you have to keep them in mind at all times.
For example, if you’re more of a lifestyle entrepreneur, you need to remember that before you go hire 10 people and get an office, because your flexibility to work from midnight to 6AM will probably go down the drain. And if you’re trying to build a big tech company that Facebook will buy, you more than likely can’t do that on your own and will need other innovators to join in.
I don’t think this only applies to business, either.
Consider your life goals when you’re looking for a job too. Are you hoping for corporate executive or are you really more interested in long summer vacations?
I think we all get so scared and caught up in the immediate problem of making the dollar that we forget to look up at the distance. It’s a difficult thing to do, but keeping your eye on that overall goal will help you make lots and lots of decisions along the way. I know for me it’s made a big difference to have my life goals in mind as part of my business goals.
