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Episode Transcript:
Building a business isn't a series of steps for you to follow. It's more beautiful and much more exciting than that.
Welcome back to another episode in the 7 pet peeves series.
Most programs out there to help you build your business offer a step by step process that takes you to your goal if you just follow it.
People love it because it promises certainty.
So what’s wrong with step by step processes?
It isn’t that step by step processes don’t have a place. They’re perfect for learning a skill or for reproducing something.
Just think of putting together an IKEA shelf, or following a recipe to cook something.
And when you build a business you’ll have to learn a lot of new skills and you’ll want to find the most efficient way to learn them.
But building your business isn’t just a new skill.
It’s about innovation, about creating something new, and it’s about YOU finding your way in this new world of entrepreneurship.
And innovation and creation isn’t a linear path from a clearly defined start to a clearly defined goal, that just isn’t how it works.
It doesn’t mean there isn’t a process or structure.
When I worked in software development projects followed a clear methodology: creating software involves iterating through the phases of the creative process
- You start out with an idea of where you’re headed, a hypothesis
- Start exploring the options
- Then you narrow them down and design your solution
- Next you plan and prioritise and break down the tasks
- But you don’t build the whole thing, you start with the most critical elements and implement them
- Then you stop and review, evaluate new findings and plan the next iteration
It’s the fastest way to a working solution that can mature as you learn and evolve.
Later I found that as a dressmaker, sewing bespoke dance costumes, I went through exactly the same process.
Once you start looking, you can see that the creative process is always the same, no matter what you create.
And it’s easy to see it play out when it comes to building your business.
In case you’re wondering, I’m not the only one who’s come to that conclusion. Have you ever met a real rocket scientist? Well, I have 🙂
Amy Simpkins, who left her impressive career as an astronautical engineer behind to follow her passion (her episode for the Passion Business Podcast will be out in a couple of weeks) has written a book called Spiral where she goes deep into the concept of spirals in nature, how everything goes through cycles and we’re doing better when we embrace rather than fight them, and how business and personal development go hand in hand.
So if you've ever followed all the steps of a step by step process to build your business, just to find you didn’t get the expected result, that somehow it felt OFF, now you know that you didn’t fail, you simply went through one iteration of the creative process, through one cycle of the spiral of innovation.
