Use What You have
It’s easy to believe you need more than what you have to get started. You don’t.
It’s one of the hardest obstacles to overcome– your own self-limiting beliefs, the idea that you don’t have enough money or experience or even energy to do what it is you’ve been called to do.
Recently I was ruminating on my business tagline, “Dreams are resilient.” More specifically I was thinking on the veracity of that statement, because I know a lot of dreamkillers. People who because of their own fears and failures will do their best, whether consciously or unconsciously, to convince you that your own dreams don’t have merit, or that they’re unrealistic. But if they were realistic they wouldn’t be called dreams.
When I first came up with the idea for Press I was so excited. I built my one-pager illustrating the idea in what felt like minutes and I started putting together a vision board, envisioning what the final business would look like. But then I started researching and looking at the cost. I started to realize I would need money, and quite a bit of it. I came to terms with the fact that this wouldn’t be a journey of me simply getting a loan and walking into a space I built from scratch. No, my journey would be more complicated than that.
But the thing about dreams is, they don’t come to fruition exactly how you think they will initially. Getting to the dream is where God steps in and it's impossible to envision exactly how the process will look. The resiliency of dreams is that they transform as you do. They mature and adapt as you do.
One of the hardest things for me to realize in this journey is that when I first wrote that one-page some years ago, I wasn’t equipped to be the owner of that business. I could barely manage myself, let alone a team of people. I was afraid of my own ideas and didn’t have the confidence to share them and let them stand alone. I could barely stomach the idea of someone else reading my writing, which for so long had been something just for me. The business I envisioned wouldn’t have been possible for me to run at that time. I simply wasn’t ready.
To be honest, I’m still not ready. But I am prepared and that makes all the difference.
I thought I needed an elaborate plan and a beautiful space to build out, a strong, robust team of people and a whole lot of money. And all those things would be nice, that’s for sure.
But what I actually need– a clear vision, a plan, time, skills and a good support system– that I already have and for now, that is enough.
