Battling inertia, or Why your WHY is so important
In the United States, a lot of people celebrated Thanksgiving yesterday. Theoretically it’s a time to express thanks and appreciation for everything and everyone in our lives. In actuality, it often is just the prelude for the madness of “Black Friday” sales.
(For those of you who are lucky enough not to know what Black Friday is, it’s the day after Thanksgiving, when many people start their holiday shopping. I found out just a few years ago it’s called that because it’s the day many retailers finally go “in the black”, i.e., show a profit.)
Many U.S. retailers opened at midnight on Friday, November 25th – and there were crowds of people waiting to get into the stores. Why would some battle their turkey-dinner-induced inertia to go out in the cold and shop at midnight? That’s a great question. Maybe it was because they wanted to get great deals and save money, or to have an adventure, or just to have the satisfaction of being first in the door.
Whatever the reason they were shopping at midnight, it had to be a big enough why to get them out in the crowds and (in many places) the cold.
There’s a powerful business lesson there: If the reason why we’re doing something isn’t big and compelling enough, we’ll take the easy way out rather than do whatever it takes to reach our goal.
Take me, for example. It was forecast to be about 20 degrees Fahrenheit in Minneapolis at midnight this morning. Seeing as how my ideal temperature is about 80 degrees, I couldn’t find any reason big enough to get me out of a warm bed and into the madness of holiday shopping at that time of night.
However, I am committed to doing whatever it takes to create a successful business. That’s why, even though I turn kind of nauseous at the thought of tackling any task having to do with technology, I’m spending part of today promoting Stepping Into Big on a site called Thumbtack. The idea is that, if an entrepreneur is looking for an implementation specialist to help her move from ideas to action , one of the places she can find me is Thumbtack.
Now, even when a tech task sounds as simple as “cut and paste”, it doesn’t always turn out to be easy – at least in my world. However, I’m serious about spreading the word that I have a great implementation process called The Take Action Now System™ that will move you OFF the hamster wheel of motion-without-progress. That’s the surface level of why I’m willing to struggle to make my Thumbtack connection go live.
However, the deeper and more important why is based on my own journey from compliant mousiness to a real sense of personal power. My mission – the why that underlies my actions – is to free big people trapped inside small thoughts and small actions. The Stepping Into Big process, the Take Action Now System™, the presence on Thumbtack and Facebook and LinkedIn and Twitter – those are just vehicles, tools to help me connect with the people that will allow me to live out my why.
To accomplish that, I’ll even deal with the hell of cut-and-paste.
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