The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

July 12No Expectations

All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.

Lydia Maria Child—Letters of Lydia Maria Chile (1882)

One of the more habitual practices of entrepreneurs is self-denigration.

We are either not saving the world hard enough or we are leaving too much on the table by not realizing the full potential of our market.

This constant pressure to do everything eats away at our ability to do anything. And then one day we look back and our lives, “viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.”

How we filter anything is through the lens of our expectations. What do you expect to accomplish on your entrepreneurial journey?

In so many ways, it is this future expectation that robs us from adding up what we've done to date to equal success. Expectations, how things are going to go, are our greatest source of stress, because if our slated path is not as planned we immediately experience failure.

What if you could let go of expectations and simply do what your heart says to do today? Yes, it might mean changing your perspective and focusing on what you truly intend to accomplish and not so much on how it gets accomplished.

Think about all the little, meaningless tasks that you think must be done a certain ...