This is why you aren’t succeeding
How faith is the key ingredient for building a business.
The lengths to which we will go to try and keep our business and personal lives separate is a fascinating study to consider when we look at many of the issues plaguing humanity, and the concept of faith is not typically seen as an integral part of the business side of life, yet pretty much every single human who ever built anything that changed the world willed it into being with every molecule of faith stored in their bodies (while working tirelessly, of course).
Six years ago, I never saw myself in this life and I certainly didn’t yet understand what role faith would play in it, which is now a life spent intertwined in a business that my husband and I have owned, operated, loved, and grown year after year since that time paired with raising a beautiful and rambunctious toddler and an introspective chow-chow together.
For us, there was never a dichotomy between our work and personal lives, both were always present at the same time, and I believe that has been a significant part of our edge.
Our experience building a successful life together has been a consistent push and pull of love, passion, determination, growth, boundless communication at all hours of the endless days and nights, and faith.
As it all sprouted into a stable business and a newborn baby, we rolled with each punch, working from the hospital room that I had just delivered in, between attempts to figure out the correct way to swaddle a baby and learn to walk again after my emergency c-section.
Before our company and real journey began, the seeds were there all along throughout our young adult lives, slowly revealing themselves to us with each new job or venture, yet we couldn’t see or understand them, so we just kept pushing ourselves and each other, wondering where it all would lead.
During one particularly low moment, when I wondered why my life was so far from what I had dreamed and hoped it would be, my boyfriend at the time (now said husband) reminded me of the famous quote by Steve Jobs that got me through that difficult time:
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Having faith in anything is profoundly challenging.
At any given time, we can hardly process what is happening in our lives, let alone attempt to understand the multiple dimensions of what each choice we make means for our lives on a grander scale, choosing whether to believe that it will lead to something genuinely dent-making for the universe, and yet, whether we like it or not, all of our actions lead us into a specific direction, with each one moving us towards it in some distinct, almost creepy way.
This is where intention comes in and the understanding that our life is moving forward regardless of how we feel about it, yet accepting that we have the power and responsibility to shift it in any direction that we desire and know in our hearts is meant to be, before we let our pre-set agreements with society break us down piece by piece into believing our dreams are much too farfetched and frankly ridiculous to be achieved in this lifetime (and possibly the next).
We must have faith in our innate power, or we are handing that power over to others with a stronger will and faith than our own.
My father always used to tell me that you can either work to make someone else’s dreams come true or work to bring your own to life, but you have to make that choice for yourself (I know this has been quoted in various ways by countless people, but to me it will always be from my dad).
To make others’ dreams come true offers relatively more safety (in theory) only if you are talented enough at what they need you to do for them, while a focus on your own dreams offers more risk of financial ruin and ridicule, but also so much more awe-inducing reward. There’s nothing quite like it.
In the first one, you are choosing to place your faith in others’ hands (they must know better than you, right?), and in the second, you are choosing to place your bets on yourself first, no matter how scary it gets or impossible it seems.
This is indeed the road less traveled and I know it is much easier said than done.
You gotta have faith.
You must be willing to remove your self-deprecating and harmful emotions from the equation and see your strengths for what they are — small advantages given to you from whatever higher power you believe in that you must act on and grow to get to the next level in the game of your own life.
We all can tell what we are even slightly better than the vast majority of others at, but it’s our choice whether we will wake up and develop it.
The confidence that you gain from realizing the full potential of those little talent seeds will lead you higher and higher in your respective specialty, as long as you maintain your faith in the process.
We know that it can be done, simply because we have done it and I can guarantee you that I am no more special than any other human being on this earth.
While I know that this isn’t the situation for everyone, if you have internet and enough access to a computer to be able to read this post, then I am speaking to you.
During our time in business, we have seen countless companies come and go, some of which we thought were too big to fail or too brilliant of an idea funded well enough that there was no way not to see it through, and yet, leave they did, disappearing as if they were never there to begin with.
Challenges have hit us hard just the same, and there have been countless moments where we didn’t know what to do or where to turn or how to continue moving forward, but time and time again, the only thing that pulled us out was sheer faith in ourselves and our willingness to see it through, continuously educating and reinventing ourselves, removing our egos along the way to focus on our talents — what we could do with what we had that would be more useful to others, and honing in on the areas where our advantages and passions gloriously met.
Faith is what got us through and faith is what I believe to be the secret edge of successful companies above all else — faith in your abilities, in your passions, in your resilience (which is stronger than you could ever imagine), in your higher power, and ultimately, in yourself.
This is the sign you’ve been looking for. Now, just go for it already.
