On the path to achieving your goals, there will be periods of uncertainty.
Hardly an entrepreneur, businessman, or sales executive goes unscathed through periods of high instability that put everything from strategy to self-confidence in jeopardy.
But if you stop to think about it, it has always been this way. There is no peace of mind for entrepreneurs.
This is a maxim we have created to build our Homeric, heroic legacy of blood, sweat and tears.
The opposite of this is to find a comfortable quadrant in life and watch yourself wither away over the years.
Then you will achieve "peace of mind".
But if you are an entrepreneur, you have an itch in your gut that drives your day forward, no matter the technical, operational, emotional, psychological, etc. conditions. You keep on working toward what you set out to do.
One way to mitigate the bumps in the journey is to set milestones and treat them as small achievements.
From then on you will have implicit in your system a mechanism that seeks out and values these small achievements, the sum total of which is a solid legacy asset that can and certainly will serve you for years to come.
And more important than establishing the small achievements and treating them like this is to assign them small celebrations in the form of rewards and a little indulgence.
I exemplify.
Suppose you aim to double the size of your company in one year.
You make 1 million, and now your goal is to make 2 million.
Suppose you have 20 active customers and your goal is to reach 50 active customers. To do this you will triple the volume of your commercial activity.
There will be three times as many contacts, three times as many meetings, three times as many proposals, and so on.
Okay so far. On paper.
Now how do you fit this new volume into an already packed agenda? Packed with professional and personal commitments, all important and unavoidable.
Little by little you are opening wedges, sticking to new routines, expanding your workload, letting go of the not-so-important things, and squeezing tasks into smaller deadlines.
And you start...
Do you agree that results will not come immediately? At least nothing close enough to reward the stress you have imposed on yourself in order to achieve your goals?
You literally catch yourself working much harder, investing much more, and with the results barely showing on the horizon.
So it is necessary to create milestones of achievement that say, "Hey, you're on the path, right! Stop for a bit and go celebrate buddy!"
This simple mechanism will take 80% of the pressure off the concrete results to come.
The good things, the really worthwhile and valuable achievements don't come easily. They take time.
I know lives that took 30 years to leave a real legacy. I know stories of lives that took two or three generations to leave a real legacy.
Building something of value, be it a product, a company, a study, a thesis, an industrial process, a career, whatever you want to define as your goal, takes time, patience and heavy emotional investment.
Not having this vision of life is to opportunize, capitalize, and seek levers that bring immediate results. These will be fragile and practically unsustainable because they are born from a confluence of imponderable, non-replicable, and non-scalable factors.
Short termism is fatal to generating real value.
How do you want your great-great-grandchildren to talk about you?
A brick today. Another brick tomorrow. Another one the day after tomorrow. And so on. You will build what you dreamed of, solidly. This is your sum of small conquests.
You will not only leave a legacy, but an example.
When I deal with entrepreneurs, my connection is immediate. We are exactly of the same tribe. I know and feel and go through what they go through: The great uncertainty.
For this my utmost respect. I have nothing against other ways of living life.
But the entrepreneur, that is my partner.
I have given on-site courses on B2B prospecting to more than 2,300 people.
In the rooms, with 30 to 50 people, the connection was immediate. In a few hours everyone was exchanging e-mails, whatsapp and the atmosphere of fraternization was huge and formed very quickly.
It is simple to know why.
We are all from the same tribe. One knows exactly what the other is going through. The identification is immediate.
That is also why you are here reading this text. You are part of it.
So, let's move on.
Check it out. I don't just speak for myself: Here's to every little achievement.
It is a sign of gratitude and a message of "we are on the right track". We all need these little nudges on a journey of real achievement.
