Birth of an Entrepreneur

This week has been an eye-opening one in some ways. I’ve joined a course online. It was a pretty knee-jerk reaction (something I am NOT known for), but it was free (for the first 150 people to join) and the guy who has created it is someone whose stuff I really like on Threads, so I thought “Why not? What have I got to lose?”

It turns out, quite a lot! I’ve lost my sense of being adrift. I’ve lost my aimlessness when it comes to sitting at my laptop. I’ve lost my apathy. I’ve lost my capacity for making excuses for myself.

Instead, I’ve gained loads, and in such a short space of time! Joining the community at Impact-Creator School has forced me to re-evaluate how I’m going about this whole “entrepreneur” thing. (The fact that I still use inverted commas around that word means there’s still a way to go, but baby steps…).

It forced to me to do the following:

• Create a timetable: I needed to be accountable for what I worked on and when, otherwise I just drifted from task to task without any real progress ever being made.
• Set an alarm to get up and make some progress before going to my day job or before my son wakes up.
• Re-evaluate my business goals and desires.
• Re-evaluate my mindset and how I view myself.

So, has it changed my life?

In a word… sorta. I am definitely more focused. This week, I got up before 6am three times and worked on whatever my timetable dictated. I started those days on a winning streak before I even left the house! I felt energised and motivated. I almost wanted to phone in sick to my day job because I was so excited to keep going on what I had started that morning.

But, very expectedly, I did not keep this momentum up for the full week. One morning I woke up around 4.15am and decided that, even for someone who is reinventing themselves, that was far too early to get up and start the day (especially as bedtime the night before had been later than I’d planned). So, I fell back asleep. And, I fell into such a deep sleep that I barely got up in time to get myself dressed before my son woke up, never mind achieve anything else! First fail of the week.

And, this defeated behaviour continued the next day. And the next. I woke up this morning partly berating myself for a wasted week, but also not at all surprised at my “failure”.

But this is where the Impact-Creator School has a part to play, because in posting about this struggle on one of the community boards, I got replies which made me realise it’s not just me. Everyone goes through this. And it’s my mindset that will get me out of it.

The goal is to not let a minor slip up or two define your entire trajectory.

And so, I sit here, on a Sunday evening, reminding myself that if I believe I am, then I am.

If I believe I am a failure, then I am.

If I believe I am motivated, then I am.

If I believe I am the person who gets up an hour earlier than normal to get some deep, focused work done in order to build the dream life I wrote about last week, then I am.

I am what I believe myself to be.

And I am a success.