If you spend too much time agonizing about what choices you should make regarding business and career opportunities that you encounter there is little chance that you will strike it rich.
You might manage to ruin your health.
The tyranny of strict goals and benchmarks could also do you in.
What matters is to look ahead and move forward, making progress and learning along the way?
All these themes and ideas are nicely put in The Anxiety Of Waiting To Be Successful by Wil (via GoBigNetwork newsletter).
Let me quote the whole piece since there is no obvious link to it:
The Anxiety of Waiting to be Successful
"Becoming successful is a stressful process.
Aside from the trials and tribulations of building a company we often
create an entirely separate bucket of anxieties just worrying about our
own career paths.
We worry that we’re not already successful enough.
We worry that we’re not growing as quickly as our peers are. We worry
that if we can’t take our company public like that twenty-something kid
did, we’re just not worthy.
All of this anxiety is not only self-imposed, it’s largely self-destructive.
While being driven to achieve, succeed and win can send us to great
heights, they can also distract and demoralize us from actually
becoming successful.
There are a few techniques that can help you transform that useless
anxiety into very practical energy to help move you and your company
forward.
Make Successful Milestones
Success rarely happens as one incredible moment where the skies part,
the rays of brilliance shine down, and a harmonious choir sings your
name a cappella.
Success isn’t a destination, it’s a series of
successful milestones that leads to a destination. Instead of worrying
about where you’ll be in ten years, worry about where you’ll be in ten
days, or ten weeks.
For example, let’s say that you wanted to build a
company to $100 million in sales. Instead of worrying about getting to
$100 million, you need to be laser focused on getting to $1 million.
While the $100 million goal is nice, it’s a distraction until you get
to your $1 million goal as quickly as possible.
The milestones along the path to success are not incidental. They
aren’t simple road markers that just happen to remind you that you’re
heading in the right direction. Every one of those milestones is success, and as of today, those milestones are the only thing that should matter.
Don’t Compare
Another mistake is comparing your performance and path to success to
someone else’s. If you read enough biographies of successful
entrepreneurs, you’ll learn one commonality – no one knew that their
path would end up where it did.
Bill Gates didn’t know that creating a computer operating system would
lead to the largest computer software company in the world. Richard
Branson didn’t know that signing Boy George and Phil Collins would make
Virgin the music label that it became.
Their incredible success at an early age had
nothing to do with comparing themselves with the progress of others –
it had to do with their focus on their own progress and timelines.
Driving yourself to “beat” others and their progress is a useless feat.
At it’s core it’s disingenuous – what someone else does should not
dictate your path. Beyond that, it’s just a waste of valuable time and
attention.
Instead of comparing your career to someone else’s’, compare your
progress against your own commitments. Whether or not you made more
money than the Google guys by your early 30’s isn’t the point. Whether
you left the office this week without creating more value than last
week is definitely the point.
Avoid Arbitrary Deadlines
In some cases we create a pre-conceived notion of when in our lives we
should be successful. We assign arbitrary milestones like “by age 30”
or “by the time I retire” or “before my dad did it in his career” to
our success goals.
That’s like Barry Bonds saying that he’s going to hit his record breaking home run on the 7th
day of August against the Washington Nationals. He couldn’t possibly
know when that moment was going to arrive until it was practically
there.
No, Bonds just kept swinging for the fences until enough balls went out of the park.
Creating deadlines for success is largely a wasted process. Nothing
magical happens when you turn 30 (I know, I tried it) and nothing you
do more quickly than your old man will make your life any better.
Your career timeline is your own, and no one else’s path should have
any bearing on yours. If you really want to kick butt, set a record
that someone else will have to worry about breaking by some point in
their life. Mark your territory with your own accomplishments, not the
retraction of someone else’s.
Get Focused
Look, you can drive yourself insane trying to beat everyone else and still wind up nowhere.
Or you can put on blinders and have complete tunnel vision on your own
success. Think of every moment that you spend worrying about what
someone else has done, or whether you’ve achieved enough by some
arbitrary date as a step backward.
Instead, use those moments of negative self-reflection as a time to think of something that you can get accomplished.
If you can manage to stay positively focused on the path ahead, you
won’t have to worry about when you’ll be successful or how. That part
will take care of itself."
End of Quote!
Long post by my standards without the obvious link.
Related story: The Secret Sauce of Success via Abilene and Mr Stern