I once had dinner with another agency owner in a restaurant in Philadelphia. At one very low point in his career, he was homeless and sleeping on a bench with his laptop in his backpack. No one knew. Not his clients. Not his friends or family.
Now, he’s very successful with an award winning agency in a highly defensible position.
His advice to me over dinner, was to figure out what you want and write it down. He said he wrote what he wanted down years ago as an exercise. What he wrote down, he’s now living.
Writing things down has a way of making things concrete. Success stops being an amorphous state always drifting in front of you and starts being something attainable.
Most business owners want to grow. It’s often a magic key in our minds. It’s not an end in itself, but is supposed to open the door to something we don’t have today. It’s a proxy for something we haven’t defined.
Beyond serving all those base lizard brain needs, your need to be loved, to belong, to be safe… What do you actually want?
It’s a good question.