My LinkedIn encounters expose me to all sorts of personalities and individuals.
- Some seem to be real-life cartoon characters, off beat and two-dimensional.
- Some are quietly larger than life with a heartful of help available.
- Some unquietly give you more than you should endure, and they live in their own delusion.
- Some are parked in the entrepreneurial lot since they could not survive anywhere else.
- Some grow to gargantuan status as spokespeople in a field or topic with a unique point of view and the gift to gather others around to join them in success.
You know some of each, because we entrepreneurs rub up against them as we hunt for our prospects in our own industries, and outside them. It takes a certain type of person to deliberately give up the comfort of salary and benefits in a big corporate environment to forge their own path.
That path is a rollercoaster ride, and the solo is stuck with shopping for benefits that are all awfully expensive. But yet we chase the dream. That dream comes in fits and starts. And it is rewarded in unexpected ways.
Yet strategic planning is very fleeting and fraught with deviations impossible to foresee, from my POV. You could plan to achieve something, or some threshold number of clients or revenue dollar amount a year from now, and boom, a pandemic hit, a major client departs unexpectedly, a market ripple hits your industry, or we are faced with any of the multitude of surprises we have to contend with in our entrepreneurial careers.
Yet we strive to weave our career narrative to a distracted reader of our LinkedIn profile, show how we are able to roll with the punches of the fight for business, bask in the glorious sunshine of success, and everything in between.
I do that, and you have to want to.
You can do it.