Date Posted: November 4th, 2010
This post is part 3 of the “How to Find Your Right Business Idea and Not Hate the Process or What I’d Tell My 21-year-old Self” series, a follow-up to the Many Bad Business Ideas series. There are four posts planned for the series and new entries will be posted every Wednesday… or Thursday as the case may be.
There are certain things that are fundamental to human fulfillment. If these basic needs aren’t met, we feel empty, incomplete. We may try to fill the void through urgency addiction. Or we may become complacent, temporarily satisfied with partial fulfillment. … The essence of these needs is captured in the phrase “to live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy.”
~Stephen Covey First Things First.
In last week’s post on things to consider when starting your business I mentioned in passing this thing called the “legacy project.” This week I’ll elaborate on what I mean by the term “legacy project” and why I think it’s important.
What is a Legacy Project
A common journaling exercise is to imagine your funeral (I know, morbid) and what you’d love people to say about you. Maybe it’s that you were the best parent to your kids or that your work helped change people’s lives for the better or that you always made people feel welcome. Your answer to this exercise is a clue as to what your legacy project should be.
A similar exercise is to imagine you’re nearing the end of your life and you’re looking back on what you’ve done. What things would leave you feeling satisfied. It could be that no one else values your rock collection, but if you made that rock collection as awesome as possible you’d consider that a life worth living. Again another clue as to what your legacy project.
Your legacy project is the project you work on to create your legacy–the things you’re remembered for–be it being the best parent you can be or creating the best rock collection you can.
How Legacy Applies to Business
When I started thinking about business, I didn’t make it a priority to figure out what my legacy should be. I just wanted a way to make money that wouldn’t make me feel sick. That’s it. So I picked ideas that seemed good (Great Lakes Early Music, Music Teaching, Small Business Web Marketing, etc.) only to find I’d get stuck. Sure some of the stuckness was from the specifics of that business (not wanting to be tied to a store, not wanting to be tied to Ann Arbor, etc.) but some of it was because of a deeper, fundamental problem. The businesses weren’t making the kind of impact I wanted to make.
If I had thought of Dragon Dormant 3 years ago, I would have dropped it. Sewing on its own isn’t enough of a motivator for me.
What I hadn’t realized was that I needed to have an outlet for creating my legacy. And not just that, I needed to feel content that I was spending enough time and energy on it before I could feel comfortable seriously pursuing other less-important-to-me projects… even if those “less important” projects were the ones bringing in the cash. I know, that sounds a bit crazy, but it was true for me.
The point here is that if you haven’t figured out what your legacy is or aren’t spending enough time on it to feel satisfied, you run the risk of major distraction during the start-up phase of your business and/or stuckness. Not good.
When you do have an outlet for creating your legacy, and feel content about how much time and energy you’re putting in, you’ll be able to put your all into your business and more business options will be open to you. Now that I have an outlet for my legacy project–this blog–I can pursue other money making avenues (Dragon Dormant, music teaching, tutoring) that wouldn’t have felt like “enough” before.
Signs You Need to Figure Out What Your Legacy Project Is
You may be thinking, “*Psh* Legacy? I’m too [young/worried about paying bills/whatever] to be thinking about that. It’s not an issue for me”. I say, hear me out. See if you’ve experienced any of these signs.
- You’re deeply unhappy with your career/major. People call you cynical. You feel like there are better ways for you to be spending your time than at the office or working on school work. There are things worth your time that you’d rather be doing.
- You feel guilty doing things that matter to you. Let’s say you love reading. If you guilty for the time you spend on it, that could be an indication that you aren’t spending enough energy on your legacy project. (“I should be working on my Project, not reading Dresden Files.”) It could also mean you have some belief that reading is a waste of time. Either way, if you’re feeling guilty you should try to determine where it’s coming from.
- You rarely/never experience flow. Flow is the state of intense focus where time passes differently and you get tons of stuff done. It’s an incredible feeling, and if you aren’t getting into it it could be because you don’t feel satisfied with how much energy you’re putting into your legacy project. (“I can’t afford to lose myself in music practice because I won’t have time for Project”)
If any of these characteristics apply to you, take a few minutes to do the following exercise. It won’t hurt, and you might learn something.
How to Find your Legacy Project
Let me start by saying that you won’t know what your legacy project is after one exercise. Finding your legacy project is an iterative process. Play with one idea for a while. After a few days/weeks ask yourself if it’s enough. If not, what is it missing? If it is enough, give it another few days/weeks and ask again. One exercise can’t tell you how you’ll feel about your idea two weeks from now. What it can do is give you some ideas to try.
Here’s an exercise to start with:
Answer these questions
- If you could only work on one project today, which one would leave you feeling the most satisfied?
- What’s important to you? Why? Think things like “being a good parent” or “creating the greatest rock collection”. Dig deep. No one has to see this but you.
- When’s the last time you experienced the flow state…. and felt like it was the most satisfying use of your time?
- What would you like to be remembered for?
- When you’re old and looking back on your life, what kind of life would like to see?
The answers to these questions will give you a glimpse of what your legacy should like like.
This isn’t the end, though because your answers will undoubtedly be too vague.
The next step,then, is to come up with some projects that are open enough to feel fulfilling and specific enough so that it’s not hard to see what the next steps are.
Example: Let’s say one of your answers was to be a great parent. That’s too vague. Being a great parent could mean lots of thing. What does that mean to you? What characteristics do you want your kids to have? Perhaps you want them to be really creative. That’s a project. It feels fulfilling and the next actions are clear. You could enroll them in an art class or schedule unstructured creative time at home or read books on how to inspire kids’ creativity. You get the idea.
Next, take the most exciting project you’ve come up with, and start working on it… or at least think about how you can start working on it. What can you cut from your schedule to make time for it? What mental blocks to you have to address?
Now you can start the iterative process, and I’ll get into that topic next week.
How This Would Have Helped My Younger Self
My 21-year-old self felt very uncomfortable contemplating her “legacy project”. She’d been told before that thinking about such things was a waste of time, and some part of her was afraid that that was true.
If she knew what I know now, she wouldn’t have listened to those people. She’d have tried more ideas, and thus would have stumbled on the right legacy project more quickly. All that angst was totally unnecessary.
Tags:
Business, Career, Purpose, Subconscious.
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Date Posted: October 14th, 2010
I debated with myself about whether or not a post on why TPLT hasn’t succeeded belongs in my “Many Bad Business Ideas” series. After all, I’m still writing in it and I still intend to grow it into something great. All of the other ideas were things I discarded. This one doesn’t fit that model.
At the same time, I’ve been writing in TPLT for the past two years, my posts have on the whole been useful and interesting (I think), but I still only have a handful of readers and a trickle of traffic. Some would say that constitutes a ‘bad business idea’, and in any case, something ought to be written about why TPLT is still in the beginning stages two years after it got started. That’s this post.
If I could only use two words to describe why TPLT hasn’t seen success it’d be these: Mental Blocks.
The “Who Am I To Talk” Mental block.
A year or two ago, right around the time I was graduating from college, I got asked by one of the adults I know what I was planning to do when I graduated. The first thought that came to my head was “I should talk about my blog” but then I got this overwhelming sick feeling. How could I say, “I’m working on my blog about living consciously”? How presumptuous of me to think I have the authority to write about such a mature topic. I have no qualifications to write about that. I haven’t accomplished anything. Who was I to talk? So I told him I was going into web design…
It’s not too hard to see why this mental block–that I’m not mature/experienced/qualified/special/whatever enough to have my writing on living consciously taken seriously–kept me from growing TPLT. I didn’t feel comfortable talking to people about what I was doing, which meant no on knew about what I was doing, which meant word about my blog wasn’t being spread.
Two years later, I’ve realized that what I needed was a better angle. Writing about ‘Living Consciously’ was too big for me. That’s the kind of thing a ‘guru’ writes about, and I don’t feel comfortable with that role. (And from what I’ve read, neither do many modern day gurus.)
My angle today is this: I write about my experience building my small online sewing business and… other hopefully helpful stuff. Much more comfortable. Maybe one day it’ll feel natural to claim I do some lofty thing like, “help people live better lives”, but right now that’s not me… and that’s OK.
The “I Don’t Talk About This Stuff In Real Life” Mental Block
This one is related to the “Who Am I To Talk” mental block. I didn’t talk about this stuff in real life because I felt insecure about it. I felt insecure about it because I wasn’t used to letting this side of me talk in real life. Ah cycles.
This has slowly been changing.
As I’ve read more and more books on personal development, I’ve found myself naturally talking about the topics I write about here. Usually I have some expert I can quote, which makes me feel more comfortable stating my opinion. (Not that everyone cares about what some ‘expert’ says.)
Every once in a while I let people in real life know about the blog, and I’m finding out that more people I know from real life are reading it blog… and nothing bad has happened because of it…
I’ve been working on having my writing style match my speaking style (elipses, parentheses and all), meaning the person on the blog is more like the person I am in real life.
All of these things mean that TPLT is becoming easier and easier for me to promote. I’m not forcing anything. I’m not doing the “fake it ‘til you make it” thing. I’ve been working on making my underlying insecurities dissappear, and that has been paying off.
The “I Can’t Write When I’m Not Inspired” Mental Block
If you look at the archives you’ll notice I haven’t really kept a strict posting schedule. It’s gotten a lot better since I started the Weekly Check-ins, but before that… it was all over map. For some months I posted 10 posts. Others I missed entirely. On the whole my posting had been pretty infrequent until a couple months ago.
The explanation for this is… a bit involved, but one big part is that in the beginning I resisted the idea of scheduling time for writing. I’d found the few times I scheduled time to write, I’d go into my writing session with no inspiration whatsoever. I’d struggle to find a topic, then force myself to write something. Not fun.
Contrast that to when I wrote while I was inspired. Everything flowed. I knew exactly what I wanted to write. The content of what I was writing was better. Really everything was better. The only problem was that inspiration struck at inopportune times. Sometimes it was when I was doing something else pleasant like, say, spending time with friends or family. Other times it was while I was trying to get out of doing less fun things I had to do.
Then I read The War of Art by Stephen Pressfield. It’s quoted a lot on personal development blogs, and while I have my problems with it (it’s a bit too violent for my taste) there’s a lot of good information in there. Particularly there’s a bit where he talks about an author’s experience with inspiration.
Someone once asked Somerset Maugham if he wrote on a schedule or only when struck by inspiration. “I write only when inspiration strikes,” he replied. “Fortunately it strikes every morning at nine o’clock sharp.”
That’s a pro.
In terms of Resistance, Maugham was saying, “I despise Resistance; I will not let it faze me; I will sit down and do my work.”
Maugham reckoned another, deeper truth: that by performing the mundane physical act of sitting down and starting to work, he set in motion a mysterious but infallible sequence of events that would produce inspiration, as surely as if the goddess had synchronized her watch with his.
He knew if he built it, she would come.
When I read that something clicked. I knew he was right. Having a specific time and place set aside for creative work invites inspiration. By writing even when I don’t feel like, more often than not I’ll end up feeling inspired. I just have to do it.
I read that passage over a year ago, and it’s only been in the past month or so that I’ve really gotten a handle on writing consistently. It took so long because I spent a lot of time struggling with scheduling a time for writing. Taking an hour or two in the morning before work was hard because my morning routine takes a while, and I end up resenting having to stop to go to work. In the evening I have a lot of activities and my creative energy is often zapped by then. Bleh. What I didn’t realize is that, while having a scheduled time and place is nice, it doesn’t matter where my long stretch of time is, as long as I have it. I’ve also found having some ritual to set the tone helps. My ritual is taking a few sips of hot tea before writing.
Today I trust myself to keep to a posting schedule, which has neutralized another mental block I had: I was afraid of disappointing readers by my low and irregular posting schedule and my inability to keep my posting promises. Now that I’ve proved to myself that I can sustain a regular schedule, I’m less worried about sending new readers packing.
The “My Blog’s Name is All Wrong” Mental Block
Also related to the “My Theme Sucks” Mental block.
ThePathLessTraveled was originally called “LaVieConsciente”, French for “The Conscious Life”. Picking a French name was a terrible idea. How could I expect readers to remember my blog’s name if they couldn’t pronounce it correctly? So I got into the “I won’t promote my blog until the name is changed” rut. Of course my name changed and I still didn’t really promote my blog. Part of the reason for that was all of the other mental blocks I’ve already talked about, but there was another reason too…
…I don’t like my theme. I think it looks amateurish, and I’m afraid it’ll turn people away. Working on the theme takes time, though, and I barely have enough of that for writing. So, I figured I’d wait until I had more time to fix the theme and then I’d promote my blog.
Of course, that’s just another excuse. I am still planning to change my theme and get a logo and all that jazz, but I’m not going to wait until then to promote the blog.
The “I Don’t Know Who My Target Audience Is” Mental Block
That’s not entirely true. I’d love to have people like my younger self reading this blog. But I don’t know where people like her are hiding. I don’t think they’re reading the blogs of other personal development people…
Again, this is just an excuse. If I post around the Internet enough, my people will self-select, other people will recommend my blog to my people, etc. I just have to get off my arse and do it.
The “My Writing Sucks” Mental Block
I never worried much about the content of my writing. I’ve felt pretty confident that my ideas are good enough compared to what else is being written. My writing is another story. I know with time it’ll improve, and people aren’t that picky about writing quality, but still. I want to be known as someone who expresses her thoughts well, and it’s frustrating to see my attempts and know they aren’t what they could be. So I played the “I don’t want to promote my blog until my writing quality is good enough” game. Excuses again.
The “I’m Uncomfortable With Becoming a Popular Blogger” Mental Block
When I first started thinking about maybe pursuing blogging, I was put off by blogs like ProBlogger because of their rhetoric, specifically how they talked about their readers. It’s hard to describe accurately (something like readers are more like numbers than people), but it was enough to know that it’d be something I’d have to deal with. Could I handle having thousands of readers? Would I start treating them as some amorphous blob too?
To be honest, I still don’t know how I’ll handle it, but I do know I’m a lot less scared by the idea than I was two years ago.
The Primary Technical Problem
You’ve probably noticed that the one thing I think TPLT has been missing is promotion. I haven’t been comfortable doing the necessary things to get the word out about my blog.
Next month I’ll be starting a different chapter of my life, and I’m planning to actively promote this blog and do what needs to be done to make TPLT a success. If after doing that I still only have a handful of readers, I’ll pay for a blog review… or something.
Was TPLT a “Bad Business Idea”? No, not really. It’s just taken a long time for me to work through my mental blocks, to align myself with success. That’s not atypical for worthwhile goals.
Next week’s post–the last post in the “Many Bad Business Ideas” series–will be about how I’d go about figuring out what career I wanted to pursue if I had to do it all over again.
Tags:
Business, Career, Mental Blocks, Self-Discipline.
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