For anyone trying to run their own business – and for that matter, for anyone trying to be productive in any dimension of their lives whatsoever – the ability to identify and accomplish ambitious projects and goals can be a very powerful thing.
What’s more, it’s even better to be able to pursue and accomplish those projects without going crazy at the same time.
Here are a few guidelines that can help you to master this fine art.
Break every project down into parts and always focus primarily on the “next step”
Whenever you have an ambitious project or goal that you would like to achieve, it will be more or less impossible to actually tackle the goal “in one go,” head-on.
What you actually need to do in order to feasibly tackle it – especially if you want to preserve your sanity – is to break the project down into its component parts to the best of your ability.
It may be, for example, that looking for a freight class shipping calculator is one essential step that you need to achieve in order to launch and ship a project that you’ve been working on for some time.
Either way, once you have figured out as many component parts as you can for a given project, you need to be able to focus primarily on the “next step” to pursue at any given time.
It’s not enough to just know that you have 20 different things to achieve to get a particular project wrapped up. You also need to be able to figure out, on the fly, what the next step is at any given moment so that you can seamlessly keep moving forward.
Collaborate with others and get feedback and opinions from multiple sources
When you’re trying to make headway on an ambitious project, you may very well run up against the particularly frustrating issue of simply not knowing where to turn next at some point, and having no insight or inspiration on the topic.
If such a situation arises, collaborating with others who you trust and whose professional judgement you respect, can be extremely helpful.
Getting feedback and opinions from multiple sources can reveal things to you that you hadn’t noticed, and it can also help to keep you sane just to have a frame of reference beyond yourself.
Set yourself reasonable weekly or monthly targets that don’t require you to burn yourself out
If all that you know is that you want to achieve an ambitious goal, or get an ambitious project done, but you don’t have any short-term constraints in place, there is a real risk that you will lose all sense of perspective and will act haphazardly and burn yourself out.
Entrepreneurial success tends, for the most part, to be “a marathon, not a sprint.”
So, set yourself reasonable weekly or monthly targets that you can focus on in the short term and structure your life around, and that don’t require you to pull back to back all nighters for no reason.
