First off, your mini-Brilliance Nuggets touch me! In the 7-day challenge, we began yesterday (you can still join in!), you have the choice to send your nugget to me – or choose not to. What you write might be private. We are playing this challenge via your word of honor. When you say you wrote it, it counts.
That said, I received mini-Brilliance Nuggets from several of you. Thank you! I’m touched. Your mini-Brilliance Nuggets are gifts to me. As a result, I thought about my bucket list (because a dear friend wrote about hers). I looked up overallmotivation.com because another dear friend sent me a quote from there. I want to share it with you because it is beautiful:
“Birds of hope are everywhere. Listen to them sing.”
Terri Guillemets
CHOOSE How You Want To Live
That brings me to the theme of my brilliance nugget today: Choose how you want to live.
At overallmotivation.com, I came across a video entitled “Entrepreneur Motivational Video 2021.” It talks about how tough entrepreneurship is. It exposes 50 of your weaknesses all at once. In the first 2-5 years, you can never have a day of rest. All this pain, the author concludes, is worth it if you are driven by wanting to have choices and control.
What Is the Payoff Of Entrepreneurship?
I want to unpack that for a second. Yes, entrepreneurship is challenging. And true, it can give you more choices than working in a job where you need to be in a particular place at a specific time.
Entrepreneurship can also limit your choices. As an entrepreneur, you need to make conscious decisions about what is important to you. When do you need or want some time off? How much time do you want to spend with your family? How much room do you want to create for friends, hobbies, and travel?
If you are not careful, your business can eat you. Your “Brilliance” can kill you – because you can never getaway. By the way, that is an excellent argument for Brilliance Mining and passing on your expertise consistently and durably.
It all comes down to this: Choose how you want to live. Each choice has some game rules. That is true whether you are
- A business owner with a team,
- A solopreneur,
- A leader in a non-profit organization,
- An expert employed by someone else,
- An employee-owner,
- A professor working in academia,
- An investor,
- A retired person,
- …the list goes on and on
Furthermore, there are many choices within the game you choose.
The video prompted me to think (again) about the payoff of being an entrepreneur.
- Yes, part of the payoff from being an entrepreneur is about choices and control of your life.
- It is also a lot about making a difference. The impact I seek to create makes me jump out of bed in the morning.
- Whom am I becoming as I do this work? The journey is the reward – much more so than what I get at “the end of the rainbow.”
- Think of hiking the Appalachian Trail. If the only thing that mattered was the day you finally reached the end of the trail, you missed out on enjoying the 2,200 miles before it!
I Invite You To Ask Yourself These Questions
These realizations lead straight back to asking yourself, “Which choices do I want to make? How do I want to live my life?”
- What do I stand for?
- What do I want to experience?
- Whom do I want to serve?
- Who do I want to work and play with?
- What abilities do I want to develop?
- To what extent is my “brilliance” killing me, i.e., limiting my choices?
I’m Curious
Which answers do you come up with? – By the way, if you need inspiration for your mini-Brilliance Nugget today, there it is! 🙂
Dr. Stephie
P.S.: I appreciate you commenting and sharing this with others. Thank you!
