I have no idea what I’m doing…
Those probably aren’t the words you want to hear/read/see. However, this is my constant fear and what’s worse is that I’m directly responsible for putting myself in this situation. It’s not like some manager or boss thrust a set of responsibilities onto me; I chose to start a company, I chose to reach out to clients and others to offer help.
It’s sometimes exhausting.
People often talk about the Impostor Syndrome that many entrepreneurs encounter. That feeling that everyone is going “find out” that you’re not the (great?) person/entrepreneur they think you are. The only way to keep from being found out is to keep going, but you have to keep running, building, executing, whatever.
And Then…
There are endless progress report meetings, official and unofficial where people asking you “how’s your business going?”
What’s worse, is the fear that what if you don’t actually make a difference? What if no one notices?
Dream Bigger, Think Bigger
I listened to this panel of great business leaders yesterday at the Edmonton Journal Capital Ideas, and it was inspiring to hear one of them answer that the only thing she would do differently was to “dream bigger, think bigger”. I’m realizing that if I want to help people in a large way, I have to do it in a large way. That’s a bit hokey but it does help set the scope.
The goal must be clear, the path less so.
At the same time, I realized, now, that the same leaders answered that they took risks. Risks involve a calculated uncertainty which means they did not know how everything was going to turn out. They knew what they wanted to achieve (growth) but the path to growth was different for each one.
So, in short, I don’t always know what I’m doing but I have an idea of what I want to get done.
