Good Idea: Pausing along the journey to make sure you’re headed in the right direction
Bad Idea: Lying down ON THE ROAD ITSELF.
As business owners, we’ve each set out on a unique journey with our team to our desired destination (our “mission”). And every day our little band of travelers is presented with new challenges to overcome and new opportunities to potentially seize. And so we keep walking along together, step-by-step, day-by-day, going...going...going. The journey itself can be so fulfilling.
But if we don’t stop from time to time to check the map, it’s easy to just get caught up in the daily process of moving along the trail and get a bit...lost.
And as this quarter comes to a close, with the next one just around the corner, it’s a perfect time to take a pause to reflect on how far we’ve come in the last 3 months. To celebrate the hard-won victories and dig into where we fell short to see what we can learn.
But most importantly, it’s a fantastic time to revisit our company’s purpose and mission to make sure we’re still on track.
I love Jim Collins and Bill Lazier’s definitions of purpose and mission from their book, BE 2.0:
Purpose: The fundamental reason for the organization’s existence
Mission: A bold, compelling, audacious goal, with a clear finish line and specific time frame
Defining these two types of “destinations” are critical because they get everyone on your team clear about the whole point of what you’re trying to accomplish through your business.
As James Clear said:
Life is easier when you know what you want—but most people don't take the time to figure out what they want.
It's not that we are completely lost, but our efforts are often slightly misdirected. People will work for years and ultimately achieve a lifestyle that isn't quite what they were hoping for—often, simply, because they never clearly defined what they wanted.
An hour of thinking can save you a decade of work.
But even if you have the clearest, most inspiring purpose and mission, things will come up to throw you off-course.
Because the opportunities along the journey...they are SO exciting! We can’t believe our luck! And of course every opportunity we take advantage of will take us someplace new.
And those challenges...MAN they can be terrifying! Our choice for how we respond will also take us someplace new.
The important question is whether that someplace is closer or farther away from the purpose and mission we stated in the first place.
Which takes us back to the importance of the quarterly pause.
It’s basically impossible to avoid missteps on your journey to build your business. Even the best decisions can sometimes take you off track. But as long as you’re reliably pausing to reorient yourself with where you want to go, you can pivot to get back on track.
I love new quarters because they feel like fresh starts where anything is possible. You can stop, take stock, and choose an entirely different path, based on the new information and your current location.
Just because you invested a lot of time or money going in a different direction doesn’t mean you should stay the course.
Pause.
Envision your destination.
Thank your past self for the gift of getting you this far and then choose the next right path.
Happy Quarter 4, ya’ll.
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