5 Steps to Clarity That Leads to Success: Week 11 of Being an Entrepreneur

For many of you, you want to be successful, whatever that means to you!

Maybe success is quitting your job to live the #vanlife.

Maybe success is getting the body you’ve always wanted.

Or maybe success is having $1,000,000 in your bank account when you retire (learn more about that here).

But what if I told you that your ability to achieve success is determined by your ability to get clear on your challenges?

What I Learned from Fast Growing Tech Companies

In my previous job, I worked with some of the fastest growing tech companies in the world. They were the type of companies that would grow from $0 to $50 million in revenue in the span of 5 years.

$0-$50M IN REVENUE IN FIVE YEARS! That’s wild to me!

But I also worked with slow growth companies… and in doing so, there was an enormous difference in our conversations. 

To set the stage, my conversations with companies were centered around their growth objectives, priorities that would help them achieve the objectives, and challenges/obstacles blocking them from achieving the objectives.

In my conversations with high growth tech companies, they described their objectives, priorities, and challenges with absolute clarity. 

But in my conversations with slow growth companies, they described all of that with minimal clarity. In response to my questions, I frequently got, “I don’t knows” or “We haven’t set a goal for that yet.”

So this begs the question: Why did clarity bring such incredible success to companies?

I believe the answer is that clarity allows you to understand exactly what you want to achieve, why you want to achieve it, and- perhaps most importantly- how you’ll achieve it. 

So if clarity brings success, now you need to know 2 things:

1. What do you need to get clear on?
2. How do you get clarity?

I’ve done a lot of self-reflection over the last 3 years and this is what I’ve found. 

1. Purpose

Finding your purpose brings incredible clarity to your life. Your purpose will guide you in how you make decisions for what to do in life, including whether you buy a home, rent an apartment… or buy a van #vanlife. 

2. Passions, Personality, Skills, and Drivers

Gary Vee frequently says that self-awareness is a huge factor in becoming successful, but when asked how to become more self-aware, he always says he doesn’t know how other than through intuition. 

Personally, I think there are awesome resources out there to become more self-aware, but here’s my breakdown for how I learned to become self-aware in my passions, personality, and skills:

Passions: Becoming introspective helped me with this. There are 2 questions I asked myself:

• What would I regret not doing in life when I’m on my death bed in 50 years?
• What gets me so excited consistently that I could do it day in and day out?

Personality: Take the DiSC, Strengths Finders, Myers Briggs, and Enneagram tests. Then, read through the descriptions for your results… it’ll help you out!

Skills: Honestly, just try stuff… you’ll learn what you’re good at and bad at!

Divers: Again becoming introspective helps with this. What drives you? Is it money? Is it passion? Is it love? Understanding what truly drives you and gets you to do something will make the things you do rarely feel like a chore.

3. Vision

This quote from Alice in Wonderland clearly explains the importance of a vision.

If you don’t know where you’re going, it doesn’t matter which way you go!

Having a vision for where you’re trying to go, what you’re trying to achieve, is critical to planning how you’ll achieve those things. 

But to find your vision, you must factor in your Purpose! Your Purpose should drive your dreams and aspirations. 

If your vision and purpose are misaligned, failure is bound to occur because there’s no alignment between them. 

4. Objectives

Objective setting exercises enable you to plan out how you’ll actually achieve your vision. However, you need to take your passions, personality, skills, and drivers into account. 

Have you ever met someone who tries to do everything themselves? (*coughs* *looks in the mirror at myself*)

Nobody achieves anything big by themselves. High achievers always have a team around them, supporting their dreams.

Accounting for your passions, personality, skills, and drivers when setting objectives will show you what your role should be in achieving your vision and bring clarity to your gaps.

That way, you can recruit people to help you with your objectives!

5. Challenges 

I’ve listened to conversations with or directly talked to hundreds of entrepreneurs. In these conversations, entrepreneurs have talked about what’s going well and sometimes what’s not going well. 

What’s shocking though is that second part- so often if I ask a startup or small business owner, “What’s most challenging to you right now?” I get 1 of 2 answers:

1. Nothing is wrong.
2. I don’t know anything about X.

What seems wrong with these replies?

First, I’ve never met a business with actually zero challenges or obstacles. Everybody has challenges and there’s no such thing as a perfect business. Some businesses are great at generating leads, but struggle to recruit the talent they need. Or maybe they’re great at both of those, but need more funding. Or maybe they have so much money and need to spend it faster to grow to keep up with competition. Or maybe…

Do you see where this is going?

Second, if an entrepreneur doesn’t know anything about X, they frequently feel paralyzed. This feeling of paralyzation is dangerous because it keeps your mind from coming up with questions to ask to gather more information and can keep you from searching for the answers yourself. 

So, it’s critical that you become honest and clear about the challenges you’re facing so that you can find the solution!

Those are my thoughts- what do you think? 

Weekly Review

As always, I like to give a breakdown of what I did this week. This gives me space to be more mindful about what I did and how I can do better the next week!

This week, I can honestly say I was focused on what I needed to get done. 

Monday: I had a great meeting in the morning with someone I met on the app Clubhouse and did some prospecting. Then, I’m also looking to do more speaking engagements, and I created my “menu” or talks that I can do! Really excited to see where business opportunities end up.

Tuesday: Honestly, I did the exact same thing as Monday :) Super worthwhile. 

Wednesday: I woke up a little late, but did some prospecting and went to a fantastic networking event in Naples, FL! Then rushed home and met with someone on the networking app Lunchclub. After that, met with a prospective customer and then a prospective partner.  

Thursday: I had to be hyper-focused because I had a lot to do outside of just work! I started developing a new process for my company to follow based on feedback we received from marketing agencies. Then, started R&D for that new process and figuring out my messaging. 

Friday: Today, I have a productive day planned out full of testing my new process and writing! It’s an exciting time!

It was another good week! I’ll have more updates for y’all later!