1. Time will fly by REALLY quickly
So don’t stick with something just because you think that’s whats going to make you money or what’s going to be ‘easy’ for you. What’s easy is what brings you energy, follow that.
2. Don’t leave fresh new ideas on ice for too long.
You can’t capture the spark again later if you’re in flow with an idea, so don’t hold off launching forever because there is likelihood it will stagnate and it will become harder and harder to get that thing off the ground. Improve as you go, put it out there even if you think it’s not ‘good’.
3. Create more than you consume.
Or at least, create BEFORE you consume. Feeding yourself a high fructose corn-syrup diet of crappy content can atrophy your creativity muscle. It can also confuse you, and your inner voice can be drowned out by all the noise. Find stillness and listen to the voice within.
4. Balance your Bandwidth.
Are you choosing to hire yourself over someone else? It’s not just the time you spend on a task that you need to consider, you need to think of how many bandwidth units it’s going to take. Roald Dahl would only work for 4 hours per day – His experience told him a writer ‘should never work for too long at a stretch, because after about two hours you are not at your highest level of concentration, so you have to stop.’
5. Create something original in your work.
Follow your wayward desires, your whims. Tune into the frequency of your inner voice. Create a world of wonderment and magic in your business, find that twinkle, let your voice be loud, allow yourself to be seen, because the more you hide of yourself, the more you are denying a piece of yourself. Create something that has never existed before.
6. Having things go wrong will forge your strength
I was naively confident when I started out – and it was working, till it blew up in my face when I charged ahead on the wrong advice. But when you’re forged in the fires of Mt Doom, so your confidence becomes stronger, made of metal and won’t crumble under pressure in the future.
7. Prioritise your business
Are you working IN the business or ON the business?
The client workload will not let up, in fact it will probably increase unless you create boundaries for yourself. Stop trading your soul for those little tasks that you hate doing. Treat your own projects like a fledgling baby bird in need of food, shelter and constant care.
8. Sales are sanity, social media followers are vanity
I have a separate IG account from my Barefoot Branding one and I’ve made more sales than I have followers, and not many people know about this other business I run. As long as you are making sales, your business will keep growing and moving forward. Your goal is not to have a big following (although nothing wrong with that) your goal is to have a continual stream of leads and sales.
9. Only some things can be learned by experience
You can learn to go swimming from reading about it in a book, or you can go swimming. Get your feet wet. There aren’t really shortcuts to that holy grail of 100k like most courses will promise you, then what happens is you become despondent because following their system didn’t work for you. That’s because you are copying someone else’s formula, but you need to carve and hack the path to create your own.
10. Bro marketing is not the only way to run your business.
Find the unique ways you like to work and create, make something one-of-a-kind. Don’t feel like you need to copy + paste what other people are doing, and not in the way bro marketers have you do it with rinse and repeat templates.
