Would you choose not to fall in love, ever, because “everyone has done that?” Or is it a little bit special when you, yourself, fall in love?
Of course it’s special when it’s we that have the experience. And so it is with your company, no matter if you are the 500th bakery or the 80th social networking site. You are your own compass north. When you believe that, you open a frontier of possibility no one else has permission to touch.
You can only own the world you yourself have crafted, in your actions, with your own sweat. Everything else is squatting.
It takes a process of refinement, testing and just plain accepting to come up with your own compass north. For example, most authors will tell you their books are a byproduct of a creative process that includes MANY outputs—only one of which is publishable.
Ernest Hemmingway put it well when he said, “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”
But there’s great hope in that idea, that the process is the answer. The critical part, in other words, is not the outcome (our company), but our journey. It’s not necessarily the book you write, the business you are building, the painting, or the screenplay—it’s the making the book, building the business, and dreaming the movie—all acts of powerful self creation and organization.
That’s the bleeding Hemingway is talking about—unique personal “expression.” The word “expression” actually does mean to push out, just like “expeller pressed” olive oil.
By organizing our own mind in a form where we can give expression, we become more of whom we are. Just be committing to that, we share some of our own platform for living with the world.
If you want to organize and express a world, your world, you can see why I would say that the truth is, you’re ruling it. You made it.
And sure much of it, some may tell you even most of it, is not original, not profound—not “special.” Ignore that point of view. It’s not about how your thoughts stack up to the world.
It’s how they change you on their journey from your heart to your hand. It’s about the ideas from the outter culture you CHOOSE to accept in your inner empire.
That is your unique path, one you have never set foot on. The fact that billions go before and behind is irrelevant. You still get to go. It’s your choice to take the next steps. It’s your choice to select your impressions. It’s your option to hone your perceptions into something you can breathe with and believe. Into something you can own. Into something entirely yours.
–This is an excerpt from the book How You Rule the World: a Survival Guide for Female Entrepreneurs, available free on Amazon Kindle Unlimited
