Core Mission

Okay, you have your entrepreneurial capital in line. You've ramped up your passion, honed your leadership skills. You're expanding your network, and you have some money to devote to this project. What is your core mission in life? What are your core vales? What were you put on earth to do? What satisfies you? How will you know if you are successful? These are questions each of us needs to get a handle on in our lives.

Todd Duncan, in Killing the Sale; the 10 Fatal Mistakes Salespeople Make and How to Avoid Them. Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 2004, says:

Success in sales has everything to do with keeping personal priorities. In other words, salespeople can increase their success only by putting boundaries on their businesses that help them up hold and promote their priorities throughout the day. If you don't put boundaries on your business, you'll never achieve balance in your life. Success by definition is supposed to produce satisfaction. Therefore, your sales career, if it is successful, should produce more life satisfaction. But if you don't know what makes you a satisfied person in the first place, you'll frequently invest time in things that don't matter and strive for things that don't add value to your life. [p.73]

Duncan has an exercise that you can use to help you answer these questions. He says it is you can find it at www.killingthesale.com, but when I checked on it, Google said it's not around. If you want to follow up, email me and I'll send it to you.

I first did this exercise in the fall of 2006. I was given the book and read it on vacation just to see what it was about. It turned out to be revolutionary in my life, and I'm going to go further into it in this blog. No I do it every 6-9 months to make sure I'm still on track.

This is some of the stuff that will go into my entrepreneurship course. The ideas in it supply the life's blood of my professional activities: teaching, writing, and real estate. For entrepreneurial real estate go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com/blog and for entrepreneurial writing to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot/com.

Vision Statement

Google "Vision Statement" and you'll find a site called Time Thoughts; Resources for Personal & Career Success.com that defines a vision statement as:

A vivid idealized description of a desired outcome that inspires, energizes and helps you create a mental picture of your target. It could be a vision of a part of your life, or the outcome of a project or goal.

If you're interested in this, read the entire entry and follow its link.

The vision statement is more than just an interesting exercise. It puts into writing the entrepreneur's core values are and what things are most important. When we write things down, we own them. They mean more to us. As the entrepreneur goes forward he or she can look back on it and revise or reaffirm it. If the entrepeneur's core values have changed, he or she can analyze these changes and what they mean for their goals. If entrepreneurs don't know who they are or what's important to them and why they do what they're doing, their enterprises will either fall short of their objectives or entrepreneurs will feel frustrated and angry from being inauthentic.

If you find this interesting, post a comment. I'm interested in what you think.

Entrepreneurship informs everything I do. For entrepreneurial real estate, go to www.yourstopforrealestate.com and for my entrepreneurial writing blog to to www.kearneymusicschoolmurders.blogspot.com