UNCERTAINTY CAN DRIVE you nuts!

The market is shifting.  Regulations are up in the air.  Partners can be unpredictable.  Employees are, well, human.

As a business owner, your job is to create some stability despite all this shifting sand.  Sorry to give you the bad news, but it’s the only way you’ll make progress.

So how does that work?  What tools do you have to create certainty out of almost nothing?

The most powerful thing is a strong sense of purpose.  You pick something that’s important, inspiring, and meaningful.  Then push other things aside in pursuit of your mission.

To sustain that, you then have to:

  • Be OK with letting other stuff go
  • Grow your set of people, inside and outside the company, who are as dedicated to the mission as you are
  • Build your measurement, feedback and reward systems around this mission
  • Even a fair dose of chutzpah and “fake it ‘til you make it”

When you pick a mission, you’re not saying that nothing else in the world is important.  You’re saying that the other stuff isn’t a priority for us, right now, in this context.  You can let it go, trusting that other people will be inspired to work on that other stuff.

And that’s fine.  You can only make an impact in the world in a very few places.

Focus there.