In this post I’ll talk about how to persevere as a creative entrepreneur and small business owner when the going gets tough. What I mean by perseverance is simple: what makes us wake up everyday and work towards the same goals? What helps us keep going day after day, especially when we’re tired or the work isn’t that exciting?
When you work for yourself, you’re usually running several roles at the same time: social media marketer, finance officer, sales adviser, graphic designer, herder of cats… You’re your own boss and you can only lean on yourself – or your business partner(s) if you’re in a jointly owned business – and sometimes it can be hard to keep up the momentum due to burnout, loss of motivation, or a number of other factors.
In this short guide, I’ll show you what worked for Modek Media during our start-up phase, and share the tips that helped us stay on track and kept us loving what we do!
The start-up phase
I remember when I first transitioned from working a full-time corporate job to working for myself. I teamed up with my best mate Mel and decided to give Modek Media a fair go. We had a lot to learn starting a creative business from scratch; we’d go from blog posts to YouTube videos to podcasts to books, searching for things to supplement our existing knowledge and point us in the right direction. It was frustrating and overwhelming, and sometimes we struggled.
For example, when putting together our business plan, there were several elements that were outside of our areas of expertise and required some research on our part. We found it laborious and frustrating, as we wanted to move ahead with other elements of the business. The catch 22: we needed the business plan to understand what we were working towards, because without it the work was directionless. Thus the frustration continued, and we were oblivious to how the lack of direction impacted our ability to persevere.
When you’re starting a business, you’re asking yourself a million different questions: do I have enough capital? What equipment and resources do I need to make this happen? Can I do it myself or do I need to hire someone? These are all things you need to ask in order to determine the scope and focus of your business. However the most important and simplest question to ask, which many people often miss in the early stages, is this: do I know what I’m working towards and what I want to achieve?
Without our business plan in place to outline what we were working towards and how we planned to get there, we realised quickly that we were feeling directionless and frustrated, and it was difficult to persevere on a path that felt overgrown and unclear. We had big dreams, what was missing were the goals and the plan to help us achieve them. We needed to clear a path for our long journey ahead.
So where do you start, and what is going to keep you motivated on this journey?
Intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation
When you work for yourself, you have the luxury of setting your own goals, deadlines, tasks and working hours. You steer the ship in whatever direction you choose, and as a result, you’re accountable for how the ship runs and responsible for where you end up. You can shift your work around how you see fit, and at the end of the day when something doesn’t get done in the way or on the timeline you wanted, you’re answerable to yourself. If you don’t raise the sails, will you catch the wind to help propel the ship forward? Your motivation is intrinsic, aka, your reward is the satisfaction and gratification of achieving what you set out to achieve. When you do complete the things you said you were going to, you have yourself to thank and that feeling of self-reliance and accomplishment is both super empowering and incredibly rewarding!
When you work for someone else, someone else sets the direction of the ship and plans the work out for you. You do not have the option to extend your deadlines without prior consent or permission from your boss, and you’re accountable to someone else. Your motivation is extrinsic and based on external rewards (such as praise from your boss, bonuses, awards, your salary).
When it comes to your business, knowing what you want to achieve, how you’re going to achieve it, and knowing how much you want to achieve it, are all critical steps in helping you persevere towards your end goal. Below I outline the steps to help you stay on track towards living your dreams.
Step 1: Dream big
This is the easy part! Grab a book, some scrap paper, butcher's paper, or your laptop and start jotting down the things you want to achieve. Think about all the things you want to accomplish, why you want to accomplish them, and write them down.
For example, maybe you want to launch a magazine about the music scene in your hometown. What draws you to this and why do you want to do it? Maybe you’re a musician, or your parents were, so there’s a personal aspect to it that piques your curiosity, and you want your magazine to serve as a historical memoir of your experiences within the local music scene. Or maybe you want to own a jet plane, like Mel does.
Whatever your dreams and aspirations are, write them down so they’re clear and can start to take shape in step two. It’s also important to note that your dream needs to be something achievable, so try to steer clear of things that cannot become a reality. For example, you cannot live in a cartoon world, however you can create an animation or comic strip where you’re the main character.
When writing down your dreams, try to keep them clear and realistic.
Step Two: Plan your goals
This next part is tricky: how do you get from where you are now to living the dreams you just wrote down? In this step, you need to write down the steps you need to take and the smaller things you need to achieve in order to reach that dream: the end goal.
For example, to start your magazine, you would need writers, photographers, maybe some graphic designers, an editor, and subjects: the musicians. Your main goals are to secure a team of people, conduct interviews with local musicians, develop the main design and style of your magazine, and finally, publish.
Once you’ve come up with your main goals, you can start to break them down into smaller steps, called subgoals. For example, you know you need to secure a team of people for your magazine, so some of your smaller steps could be 1) flesh out the roles you need for your team and what duties they entail, 2) advertise for the roles, 3) sort through applicants for suitability for the role, 4) conduct interviews, 5) hire and welcome people to the team.
By breaking down the main goals into their smaller steps, you start to paint a clearer picture of all the things that help you to achieve that end goal.
Something that’s important to remember is that you’re not going to achieve your goals overnight. It’s going to take time, energy, and a lot of perseverance to get there – things you’re going to need for the final step.
Step Three: Execute and stay the course
Much like the Nike slogan, or Shia LaBeouf’s motivational speech, the only way that you’re going to reach your goals is to just do it. You need to have drive and accountability when it comes to achieving goals you’ve set for yourself. Once you’ve planned out your dreams, the next step is to execute them.
Tying into our last blog post about embracing the suck, which is all about mindset and publishing, when it comes to executing and actioning your goals, you need follow-through. It’s easy to get stuck in a perfectionist or fear cycle and let that inhibit you from going for the things you want in life, and this is where your perseverance comes into play.
Persevering is all about drive. Your drive comes from knowing what you want to achieve, and knowing what steps you need to take to get there. Your drive is knowing how much you want to achieve those goals and putting the time and effort into fulfilling them.
A helpful trick to pull you out of those ruts on your off days where you’re feeling a little unmotivated and directionless, is to make your goals visible. Put them up on your wall where you can see them clearly and you know what you’re working towards. We have this on our wall in the Modek Media office, which helps us keep on track on those off days when it’s difficult to perform.
Knowing what we’re working towards and why, knowing how much we want to achieve those goals, and reminding ourselves of our end goals often, are all things that help us persevere when the going gets tough.
Conclusion
In this article, we talked about persevering on the road to reaching your dream. We took you through a 3 step process for turning your dreams into a scaffolded plan of goals and subgoals, and how you need drive and accountability to execute your plan.
Where we talked about drive in this article, we referred to the deep desire you hold for wanting to achieve your dream. Where we mentioned accountability, we referred to the follow-through that’s required to action your tasks and how you need to be responsible to yourself for getting them done (especially when you’re your own boss).
Next time you are feeling directionless in your business, take a moment to dream (write down your ideas), plan (set goals and subgoals), and execute (use your drive and accountability to action your plan).
For a deeper dive into our advice on perseverance, listen to our podcast episode.
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