Feeling burned out from the hours and stress of getting your business off the ground? Now may be the time to replace your everyday goals with a quest for something bigger.
Building a business is tiring work. In the beginning, it’s just you. There’s nobody to coach, cajole, or encourage you.
But you keep going anyway. If you stick it out long enough, you may hire a few employees. With full-time staff, you have a built-in motivation to meet payroll, but at some point even having others rely on you can start feeling hollow.
In some ways, having a boss is easier; someone else sets your objectives and holds you accountable. You don’t have to constantly motivate yourself to do more, because someone else is already asking.
Do You Get Motivated By Setting Goals?
As an entrepreneur, the motivation to always carry on has to come from inside you. To cope, a lot of us become compulsive goal setters. Our objectives become our guiding light and the reason we get up in the morning.
But even goals can start to become boring. Typical goals (hit $1 million in annual sales, start a third location, etc.) can sound good on paper but provide little emotional energy when nobody other than you is keeping score.
If you don’t find your goals motivating anymore, you may want to consider replacing your goals with what Chris Guillebeau calls a “quest” in his new book The Happiness of Pursuit. You probably know the name Guillebeau from his other bestsellers, The $100 Startup and The Art of Non-Conformity. In his latest book, Guillebeau argues that pursuing a really big goal or “quest” is good for the soul.
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John Warrillow is the author of Built to Sell: Creating a Business That Can Thrive Without You and the founder of The Sellability Score, a cloud-based software company that helps business owners improve the value of their company.
