Fly on the E-Commerce Cyberwall

Are You Using the Most Powerful Force to Propel Your Business Forward?
This force is totally free, but many business owners fail to use it. The force is momentum. It involves two things. First, get yourself going. Second, keep yourself going.

The first part is hard. You have inertia working against you. You know, the old "things at rest tend to stay..." you know the rest.

It's so easy to sit and dream of a better life. But if you don't actually get up and do something, you'll never do anything but dream. So taking action—any action—to put your dreams in motion is crucial. Only then can you start to build momentum.

But the funny thing is, when you pursue your dreams, that other law of inertia doesn't seem as powerful as the one that made starting so difficult. The way it's SUPPOSED to work is, "things in motion tend to stay in motion." But that isn't necessarily what we find when we start our own business.

It seems that every little obstacle threatens to stop us in our tracks as we fume and fumble over even the littlest thing. It's like if you got a big boulder just barely rolling and then it hits a pebble that stops it dead.

No, there's more to momentum than just that initial effort. We have to get the boulder rolling at a pretty steady pace before it will roll right over those pebbles without difficulty.

But there's another problem, too, that can stop our momentum. Sometimes we put on the brakes on our business' momentum ourselves.

Every business comes to the point where we're actually making progress. But instead of keeping that momentum going, we suddenly encounter a deeply felt need to go in some other direction.

Maybe we're making good progress when suddenly we learn of something new that seems more exciting than what we're doing. So we let go of the progress we've made to start from scratch on pursuing either another direction or even another business idea altogether.

Bye-bye "things in motion" and hello again to "things at rest."

Why do we do that? Maybe we didn't have a clear enough vision of where we wanted to go. Or maybe a hidden fear of the unknown caused us to put on the brakes.

Again, it's easy to dream of changing our lives for the better. But preparing to accept a totally new life can be disconcerting.

Sure, if you dream of owning your own business, the thought of being your own boss is a pleasant one. But when you confront the reality of it, you start to see the downsides, too.

Hey, if you're your own boss, there's no one else to blame when things don't go right. You have total responsibility for whatever results occur. That can be uncomfortable, especially if you have absolutely no experience dealing with that.

So it becomes very tempting to stop our momentum—unconsciously sabotaging all our efforts—to avoid stepping into that unfamiliar territory.

So it's important to have a clear vision of where you want to go. And when the temptation comes to grind to a halt and go in another direction, recognize it for what it is. Keep that momentum going!
Jeff