You can’t build a flame without first stoking an ember

Why would your business be any different?

Entrepreneurs are a unique kind of breed.

We have high hopes, large aspirations, and vivid imaginations — but we also know what we are capable of, and they’re usually one in the same.

We know we can accomplish our dreams, we know that whatever we aspire to we can become, we know that our high hopes we will later look back on as actually undercutting our potential.

The struggle we fall into, however, is thinking that all of this happens all at once. It doesn’t.

Great success, the success that we really want, takes time — and a lot of it.

It takes grinding through the struggles, facing our hardest stresses, having our biggest wins ever, only to have them immediately taken away, and having to fight back to recover the opportunity to push against our boundaries once again.

Like a star quarterback going 15–1 in the regular season, being picked to win the Super Bowl by 6 points, only to lose it big on the biggest day of his career. We have to be ready not to quit, to accept that reality, and to come back harder, and more ferocious than ever before. We have to be humbled, over and over again, while striving to do what we know we’re capable of — because that’s the only way we will reach that mountain top that we dream of — by never stop pushing forward.

The little wins compound, the large failures teach us, the connections we create reverberate and mingle together, opportunities percolate and find their way back to us.

We jump on new opportunities, we search for more, wiser now knowing what we learned through all of our failures and near-wins.

Eventually the ember catches, the kindling is lit, the logs light up, and the fire is burning.

Adding to a live fire is easy, so long as you know the right wood to burn.

Starting a fire is the hard part, because it takes time, dedication, determination, sacrifice, focus, will, and strength.

If you’re really committed to making the fire happen — to growing your own thing, don’t fall short before your ember is lit, or you will never know what it is like to bask in the light.