Start Before You’re Ready (the secret habit of successful Entrepreneurs)

Do you ever wonder about the secret behind the most successful entrepreneurs? The real habit you need to create a thriving business? It’s actually pretty simple, start before you’re ready.

That’s it.

The world’s most successful people didn’t wait for the perfect day or for someone to knock on their door and say, “Why hello, did you know that today is THE day you should go after your dreams and pursue your brilliant idea?”

The most successful people in the world went for it. They got started.

Getting started when you’re not ready is both incredibly simple and terrifyingly daunting at the same time, but it’s essential.

If you want to know what it means to start before you’re ready and the seven steps to learn how to start before you’re ready, then you’re in the right place.

7 Steps to Learn How to Start Before You're Ready

**Everyone, and I mean everyone, started as a Beginner**

If you are thinking about jumping into the entrepreneurial life or going after any big life goal, you probably have a vision of your next-level-self and what your business will look like in 5 years.

But what you may not have pictured is the very beginning and having no idea what you’re doing or how you’re going to achieve your goals.

No one, literally no one, has it all figured out when they first start.

In fact, what your business starts as and what your business grows into may be a lot different from what you expected.

However, you will never ever build a business by simply thinking about it.

My Story about Starting Before You’re Ready

I just started a blog (really, just started, Fall 2020, Welcome!).

Do you know how many days I average double-digit unique visitors (YES DOUBLE, not triple, and definitely not getting millions of monthly page views…yet).

Not many days.

Care to guess how many people are on my email list that I’m not related to or know personally? …In the single digits.

How many Pinterest and Instagram followers I have (Note! As of writing this blog, I haven’t posted a single post on Instagram yet. Shout out to the 20 people who followed me on insta with no content!)

You get the picture.

All of these numbers are low, very low.

Some people might even say they are embarrassingly low.

There are tons, literally tons of people who want to help entrepreneurs and have way more experience, entire teams of people, have hundreds of thousands of followers, and fantastic content.

I can’t lie. I thought about not telling people about this blog until I had more blog posts written, finalized my branding, improved my site performance, had a straightforward user journey on my site, had more followers, etc.

It’s way easier to fail in front of strangers.

Who wants to stand up and say,

“Hey! Look over here! I might be doing something that could be a huge flop! Want to watch me?! Perfect! Grab your popcorn and buckle up.”

But you know what?

Waiting for the perfect day to start something, means never actually starting.

Do you know what the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, CEOs, and influencers looked like when they started?

Like a beginner. (Louder for the people in the back!)

They looked like someone with a “too big and too scary dream,” starting from the very bottom trying to figure it out, probably with plenty of people thinking, “it’ll never work.”

They looked like someone making mistakes, spending time and money while not moving anywhere fast.

However.

They also looked like someone who was learning about their ideal customers and what works for their business. They may have been giving everything away for free but what they were gaining in return was invaluable.

Every small win gives you the courage to keep going, trying, and failing (one of my favorite mottos is, Failure is Progress).

Starting Before You’re Ready Takes Courage

The truth is, it’s not easy to start before you’re ready.

As I said, no one actually wants to fail in front of other people, and there is also the voice of self-doubt in your head, and sometimes even imposter syndrome.

Maybe you read on someone’s site that they started with ZERO experience but they are currently running a large multi-million dollar business with a vast reach.

It’s tough to believe that someone started at the bottom when you only see them at the top.

You didn’t see them when they were giving away value for free, or figuring out how to draft contracts with vendors to make a product, or trying to get their ideal client to join their email list, had very little money and no contacts to help them.

If you have a voice in your head constantly saying things like,

“You’re too late. You should have jumped in 5 years ago.”
“You’re not techy enough to make a website.”
“It’s already been done.”
“You have no idea what you’re doing.”
“You’ll never be as good as….”
“You’re not qualified.”

The list goes on.

Let me assure you. You are not a fraud for wanting to go after your dreams.

Remember, Richard Branson started an airline with absolutely no experience working in the airline industry, or any insight into aircraft engineering.

Self-doubt is common. Do you know who else had thoughts of self-doubt?

Have you ever heard of Maya Angelou?

Yes, that, Maya Angelou. The incredible civil rights activist, author, poet, and Nobel Laureate once said:

“I have written 11 books, but each time I think, ‘uh oh, they’re going to find out now. I’ve run a game on everybody, and they’re going to find me out.’”

What about Tom Hanks? Yes, Tom Hanks, the American cultural icon and academy award winner.

”No matter what we’ve done, there comes a point where you think, ‘How did I get here? When are they going to discover that I am, in fact, a fraud and take everything away from me?’”

Maya and Tom aren’t alone.

Do a quick google search and you will find tons of CEOs, entrepreneurs, authors, and people who have changed the world who had self-doubt.

Even when I was working at my 9-5 and doing well, I occasionally thought, “Have they figured me out yet? How long does ‘fake it til you make it’ work?”

No matter who you are or what you are going after, we all start in the same place.

Know that you are in good company when you decide to be the person who goes after what you want, even without money, resources, and experience.

You’re not alone when you feel unprepared and under-qualified. But you don’t need anything else.

You are probably more qualified than you think you are, and as long as you are willing to jump in and learn, there is nothing that you can’t figure out.

Please do yourself a favor, ditch your limiting mindset, and go for it.

How to Start Before You’re Ready in Seven Steps

It’s so much easier said than done to stop spending time planning and jump in.

Try to remind yourself, the perfect day to start does not exist – It’s like waiting for a unicorn. Look in the mirror. YOU are the unicorn.

Let’s jump into those seven steps now, shall we?

How to start before you're ready. Motivational entrepreneur quote.

1. Give Yourself Permission to Grow Slowly

Steve Jobs once said, “if you look closely, most overnight successes took a long time.”

You will be investing a lot of time into your work, and unless you are lucky enough to have all day to work on it, your work will be done in the margins (aka before your typical day starts and after your typical day ends). Which means it will probably take longer than you expect, and that’s ok!

No rulebook says you have to accomplish everything by a specific date.

We are playing the long game here. Slow and steady wins the race, and the progress that you make, no matter how small, will build up to be monumental if you stick with it.

The learning curve when starting something new is steep. Give yourself the time to learn it, and try not to get disheartened if you don’t think you’re moving fast enough.

As long as you know that you are giving it your all, then you’re doing great.

2. Be Flexible

The only constant in life is change.
Heraclitus

Change will become your best friend. Businesses have to evolve to survive.

Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn, said, “If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.”

You will change direction, maybe multiple times, you’re going to make mistakes. You’re going to spend money on things that turn out to be a disappointment, and that’s ok.

One benefit of being a beginner is that the earlier you can identify what needs to be changed, the easier and less expensive it will be in the long run.

Having to move an entire website from one host to another without anyone helping besides the Bluehost live chat is much less impactful (personal experience doing this!) when you only have a few visitors then if you have tons of them.

In the same way that you gave yourself permission to grow slowly, give yourself the room to make mistakes.

You are a beginner. You are going to make lots of glorious mistakes.

Although they suck in the moment, failure of any kind is progress, and you can use each mistake to learn and grow and be proud that you are living your life outside of your comfort zone.

3. Make a Launch List

I love a list.

Sometimes when I create lists, the first item on my list is “make a list” so that once I’m done creating the list, I can cross one thing off.

As you can imagine, I made a launch list, and you should make a launch list too!

Call it whatever you want. Your “Launch List,” “Go live List,” “Tell People about my Business List,” but you need to make a list of what you need to “Launch.”

Be honest with your list! Only put what you need, and what your launch is.

For example, my first launch was telling my close friends and family about my blog and sharing the link with them. Also, I tested out promoting a single pin on Pinterest to drive some more traffic to my site.

Here is what was on my launch list:

Have an LLC (I actually already had this from my freelance writing business, but I had to add a DBA)
A branded blog (website, self-hosted)
10 published blog posts
Pinterest business account
Set-up my email subscription list tool

Creating a list allows you to have definitive actions that move your business forward and give you more confidence to start before you’re ready. The last thing you want is to spin your wheels trying to set something up that you don’t need to launch.

I suggest making your launch list, reviewing it, and then moving some items to the post-launch list.

My post-launch list includes a bunch of items that I initially put on my launch list before I realized that I was using my own plan to work toward perfection instead of starting before I actually felt ready.

4. Get to Work

You have a plan written down, so get to work on making your business dreams come true.

You don’t need to spend tons of money, seriously you don’t. You just need to have patience, and take action.

When you begin, your business’s growing pains help you build the foundation for scaling and focusing on your unique key selling point.

I can sit here all day long and tell you all the amazing things you can do if you go after you goals…. But if you don’t actually go for them, you will never get anywhere.

My hairdresser always tells me, “The two hands you can always count on are the ones at the end of your arms.”

She doesn’t mean this is in a negative way. She means this in an “If you want something, don’t wait for someone else to get it for you. Get off your butt and go do it” kind of way.

5. And then do it again… and again

When you first start everything feels big and scary.

For instance, when you put your first social media post out, you may feel physically nervous (sweating, butterflies in your stomach, and so on).

You might even close your eyes while you press the “post” button and then immediately close the screen. That’s perfectly fine.

Because guess what?!

You get to do it again.

And then do it again… and again! Each time will hopefully get easier, and eventually you’ll do something way bigger than posting a social media post and think back fondly on how far you’ve come.

The most important part of doing things again and again is to learn from any mistakes and do it better next time. You’ve got this!

6. Take it One Day at a Time

Once you start making progress, you might start to think of the hundreds of exciting things you can do next to move your business forward. Your dream may get even bigger, and then you might wonder how you are ever going to get there.

The wonderful thing about life is that it only comes at us one day at a time. While you need to have long-term goals, you can only do so much each day.

You need to continue to focus on creating smaller goals and milestones that support your long term goals. Then you need to only work on the next right thing to move toward those goals.

For example, if you want to gain 10,000 email subscribers, it’s important to first focus on getting one subscriber. And then focus on the type of content you will send to that one person to keep them engaged.

As you do more, you know more, and you begin to see the path you need to take to get there.

Focus only on doing the next right thing, one day at a time.

7. Become Your Own Hype Woman

Life isn’t easy. You will start, and you may immediately trip or get a paper-cut (both literally and metaphorically).

Sucky things will happen, but amazing things will happen too!

In the times when you’re tired and thinking about what you could be watching on Netflix instead of creating your business, you need something that hypes you up.

Create a playlist that makes you feel like you are on top of the world and can take on anything that comes your way. Create a vision board on Pinterest full of what you want for your business and life, with quotes that make you feel like you can achieve it.

Or find something that you really love doing, and brings you joy every time.

Whatever brings you back to the space of, “I can do this, and I’m going do this, just watch me!”

Figure it out and have it available to you all the time. Yes, you will 100% want your friends and family to support you too, but you need to be your own dang hype woman.