I was speaking to a group of aspiring entrepreneurs at a local university in Southern California recently, and a specific insight seemed to resonate with the group (and with me) above everything else. Q&A has the power to bring up ideas or concepts that you haven’t thought about in a long time and this was one I wanted to share…
You will never make it. You will never arrive at the point where you have it all figured out, and the sooner you can wrap your head around this the better.
It’s easy for all of us to put others on a pedestal. We wonder about the secret combination of inputs that cause people to be wildly successful. We idealize and romanticize about getting to a place where our businesses magically run themselves. I know when I was starting KK intl. there was always this underlying notion that if we could just make it to the next milestone — i.e. If we could be sold in that one great retailer — the rest would follow suit.
As with almost everything, it’s the same with life as it is in business. The best thing we can do is to realize the beauty in the process and understand that even those milestones we will reach come with a whole new set of challenges. As we embrace the minor victories and celebrate the fact that we have greater challenges (because my goodness we’ve actually grown our business!) we will be able to give grace to ourselves and to see others in a new lens.
No one has it all figured out. We are all just improving in incremental steps, that hopefully add up to something meaningful.
this same point in a different way}
Hey Kohl,
I love the story of KK Intl, and tried to stop by when we were in Newport Beach a few weeks ago. One of my church families hosted some interns last summer when they were here in Milwaukee. We’d love to do it again.
Your observations are right on! In fact, I think your are describing the journey as a follower (disciple) of Jesus! It’s all about the journey, period. When we finally “arrive” we will no longer be concerned with the worldly stuff anyway. I love the image CS Lewis used in Narnia and The Last Battle. It was a journey of higher up and deeper in, and as you got higher and deeper, everything got bigger and more expansive. So often when we look back and see the fruit of reaching and surpassing milestones, we see that what grew was our vision, our perspective, our appetite for ambiguity, our risk-tolerance, and our trust in our team.
You guys are awesome.
loved this <3