WIN or LEARN…

Hooray!! If you have this attitude, you have built, or are building, your business on seeing a need for improvement and creating products, processes, or services to fill that need!  You have a WIN or LEARN  attitude.  You are, or will be, one of the Passionate Creators, the most successful of the four types of business owners.

Improvement is one of the hallmarks of these business owners.  They understand no one is perfect.  Someone is always better at something than you are.  Improvement is vital to success.  But improvement is not easy.

Improvement does mean fighting a stronger opponent, whether that opponent is an external competitor or an internal trait. It is too often those things to which we have grown accustomed that do us in: our pride, worry, anger, denial, unforgiveness, addiction… Some are so familiar we do not see them. Others we have learned to love. A few may seem so much a part of us, we feel as if we would lose “us” if we evicted them from our lives. These are the real battles of life.

These are the battles that are essential to winning if we want to grow personally.

Of course, those personal battles assist us in our professional lives.  However, our professional battles tend to be more external and are often more visible. Professional battles include:

• communicating concisely
• managing time, materials, projects, people (including us 😀 ), finances,…
• organizing spaces, concepts, tasks,…
• developing processes, products, strategies,…
• delegating
• deciding what to delegate and what really does need our touch directly,
• trusting those we delegate to and fighting a desire to micromanage

And this list is only the beginning!  These are constant demands professionally. These are the wins necessary to succeed in building a business into a positive part of the community it serves.

The stakes are high. Not all win the first time. We applaud those who try, knowing they may be beaten a time or two or three… before they learn how to win.