finding a mentor – Growing Forward

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Most of us understand the basics of motivation. We have likely felt its force at some point in our lives. It can come in the most unexpected of forms. It might be an impromptu job application you decide to make once you realize someone is hiring, or perhaps simply wanting to talk to that person who’s caught your eye at work. It could be that you’re motivated to lose thirty minutes of your evening free time to read a story to your child as they sleep, knowing that these moments are those that you’ll often remember.

Personal inspiration underlies motivation, however. It always will. If motivation is a fast-moving river, inspiration is the riverbed directing the flow of water through its geographical shaping. But we can often think of inspiration as something less-than, something boring, something we needn’t keep a close eye on. We might think of it as something vague, like sand through our fingers. You might be inspired one moment, and the next it leaves you.

But these impressions are false. Inspiration is actually much more stable than motivation, and if carefully corrected, can guide you much more reliably. Let us consider why, how, and what you might need to do in order to make the most of it.

Consider Your Options

Considering how your life will proceed can often help you gauge if that’s something you’re interested in or not. There might be an open position for you at your parent’s business, but you may not find that work enjoyable, and would much rather begin starting your master’s in a direction you are most compatible with. Simply laying all of your desired options on the table, whittling them down, and considering how that might influence your life can serve as a tremendous means of visualizing how you might wish the future to continue. To us, that sounds quite worthwhile and not a little bit exciting.

Find A Mentor

It could be that finding a mentor, even in a light capacity, could help you become inspired by how far you could go – and it also might unlock your potential. Finding a mentor is often easier than you might think. For example, you might simply volunteer to help with the personal projects of your lecturer after they put the opportunity out there. You might simply ask a professional in your life to teach you something they are also interested in, and they will often be happy to lay this information down. It could simply be that learning as an apprentice, or in a job role such as listening to your head chef could all culminate in your absorbing skill, experience, and realizing your potential. This might sound like an artificial opportunity to try and create, but you’d be surprised just how many people like this are around and willing to let on what they know. From this, you might decide to shape this to your own understanding and set of principles, but never be too narrow minded to learn something.

Learn The History

Learning the history of a trade, a community, a movement, or perhaps just a craft you’re interested in can help you become informed by the building blocks of those that have come before you. Perhaps you are heavily inspired by women in tech, or the inventions of the names we all know, or the philosophies written by those you find fascinating. A history can be many things. It can help you think of the past, yes, but it can also help inspire you to better understand the present.

For example, a painter can become even more inspired by learning the techniques and insights used by Leonardo Da Vinci. Even those without a creative bone in their body might be inspired through reading such as this. This is why classic literature can hold such sway compared to modern novels. Keeping the masters in mind, or simply reading around a subject can help inform, and inspire through that. There’s almost no better means than to direct a mind through this, and it’s not hard to see why that could be the case the moment you feel it.

To Summarize

There are very many emotions, feelings, insights and contexts that can provide inspiration. Sometimes it can come because you seek it. Sometimes, it might occur due to seeing a beautiful landscape, a sunset, or simply giving your mind time to pause from the heavy responsibilities you have to keep all day. What matters is always being receptive, and applying it when it’s there.

With these tips – we hope you’re able to find your strongest inspiration.

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Entrepreneurs like to think that to be proper business people they need to know about all aspects of their business, no matter how mundane. There’s a sense that you’re not a real entrepreneur unless you know everything to do with business topics as disparate as payroll and client retention.

But the truth is that entrepreneurs don’t need to have in-depth knowledge of any of these concepts. That’s why people form companies: to collect people together who have the skills to manage all aspects of the company’s operations, where each person has an area of expertise. A marketing expert probably knows very little about employee compensation, just as an HR exec probably doesn’t know a lot about SEO.

Elon Musk is widely celebrated as one of the greatest entrepreneurs of our generation, but even he admits that he doesn’t do much of the “business stuff” in his enterprises. He is, by his own admission, not particularly good at it. Musk’s strategy is to gather people around him who do know how to run a company so that he can focus on the part of his operations where he excels: the engineering of cars and rockets.

So what should budding entrepreneurs do to make sure that they don’t get sidetracked by the stuff in their business that doesn’t matter? How can they stay focused on their core operations?

Hire Outside Help

Perhaps the main thing that entrepreneurs can do is to hire outside help for tasks that neither require nor reward personal effort. Top PEO companies, for instance, can help business leaders avoid the administrative overhead of managing staff. These agencies take over things like employee benefits and payroll, allowing senior management to focus on the real goals of the firm: expanding, making more money, and developing new products.

Get A Mentor

Sometimes it can be hard to know what to focus on with so many options. A mentor can help you cut through the noise and focus only on the activities that will help you move towards your goal. While it may seem like a good idea, for instance, to learn all you can about SEO, it’s usually a lot more productive to get somebody who already knows the subject to take over its management, while you think about your actual products. James Dyson, the inventor of cyclone vacuums, didn’t become a success because he knew the intricacies of digital marketing. He just developed a product people loved and got somebody else to do the marketing for him.

Stop Wasting Time On Pointless Tasks

Whenever you use your time, be clear about whether it’s you who should be doing it, or whether you’d get better value by passing the job over to someone else.

You might think that you’re doing the right thing by taking on a task yourself, but a moment’s reflection could reveal otherwise.

For instance, you might be on the phone to people trying to organize a meeting. But if you have a secretary, why isn’t the secretary doing this work? Likewise, if you are doing payroll yourself, why? External companies can perform all your payroll tasks at a low cost, freeing you up to do more.