Why You Need to Remember Where You Started

This article serves those who have left the launchpad and are moving through their trajectory: you need to remember where you started from. I think this serves a multitude of core purposes - some of which I will touch on in future pieces - but really, it centers around your actual happiness as a person.

Once you start stacking wins and moving forward, if you are competitive and driven like I am, you likely have the tendency to start expecting these wins of yourself. Hitting the finish line stops feeling like an achievement and simply means you met your own baseline expectations. To those reading this who may be starting out or trying to crack that first entrepreneurial win, it may sound strange, but wins can eventually become numbing when you put the weight of the world on your shoulders. How do we avoid this? Perspective. You need to remember where you started.

What Is the Mental Cost of High Personal Standards?

High standards are great in my opinion. You only get to live your life once, so why not strive to do the best you possibly can with your time and shoot for all your goals and potential achievements? That is at least how I justify it to myself. However, let that mindset go too far and you'll find that by the time you reach those achievements, you might sigh with relief more than you actually feel happy about hitting the milestone.

To speak from experience, I put such an emphasis in the early leg of my journey on scaling my business to mid-six figures that quite literally anything other than a total win became failure and a reason to keep pushing forward. Any actual win just became something I had already expected of myself, so by the time I hit that revenue goal, it simply became: "Okay, that's great, so what's the next goal?"

Unfortunately, this is still something I deal with today. Five years ago, I was working in a boatyard. From scaling my own business to an IP acquisition and joining a B2B software company as a C-suite executive, you'd think I'd be pretty stoked with myself. But the reality is, as I mentioned, it's just something I put such an emphasis on expecting from myself that it doesn't particularly excite me. I chose this topic for this week because I've literally just come out of closing a $130k p.a. deal with a new client and I didn't feel any real sense of happiness. Will the board be happy? Did I get my value-based bonus for the deal? Is this a great milestone? Yes, but it still just felt like: eh, whatever. If you're at the start of your journey, be sure to enjoy the wins without the mental weight of your own self-expectations - and if you're already on your journey and experiencing this, don't worry, you're not alone.

How Do You Enjoy Your Success While Building Your Career?

As I outlined above, this mentality of high self-standards shows up constantly in my own life. I am not yet sure why I think this way or what I had been telling myself at the start. Until I work that out, I'm not going to share some secret mental remedy to fixing your mentality or ensuring happiness from day one. But I do think I have learned a few ways over the past few years to extract personal joy from what you have achieved.

As per the title: remember where you started from. I literally have this written on the back of my bedroom door so I'm forced to read it before I get ready for the day, and I don't think I can put enough emphasis on it than that. You need to be aware of and actively recall where you started from. Even if you haven't cracked that big win yet, look at what your failures have taught you while you've been trying. Look at any new skills you've picked up, the tools you've added to your toolbox that you carry from this point forward, and simply compare who you are now to who you were when you started. It doesn't take long to start seeing the compounding effect of change on who you are compared to who you used to be. You should aim to be reasonably conscious of how far you have come as a person - would the old version of you even be willing to sit down, read this, and try to better themselves? Look for personal joy in the comparison of your mental progress.

Now, take this next part as you will, and I believe it applies more to those who are slightly further down the line - call me materialistic, but I find this typically gets a grin out of me. Look at the world around you. Are you in a better apartment? Did you buy that car? Did you get that property, buy a grail watch, or go to a high-end restaurant? Time flies when you're running down milestones. I know for myself it only feels like yesterday I was in my run-down studio apartment rental with a car I didn't even have the money to service, which I used to get to my daily job of anti-fouling ship hulls. Now all of a sudden, I get to sit in one of my dream cars, I host meetings in boardrooms with river views, and I get paid to lead teams in building my own ideas.

Even when it comes to your day-to-day workings, I think it pays mental dividends to at least remember to take it all in. When I'm sitting in an office lobby waiting for a meeting, instead of staring at my phone, I just look around and try to absorb the fact that I'm actually sitting here right now - something that at one point didn't even seem possible.

To those who read this and go, "Well, that's great for you, but what about the person who is fresh off the starting line?" The scale of this feeling doesn't have to be as grand as a car. Have you stopped having to worry about the price of a coffee? Do you know you can say yes to plans with your friends instead of keeping your wallet tight? I started at $14 an hour when I was about 20, and I used to worry if I could even buy detergent to wash my work clothes. Those subtle material differences bring me just as much joy as getting to step back and look at the grander things in my life. Really, it's all perspective, but don't forget to take a step back and look at the world around you that your hard work has built.

What Is the Framework for Finding Satisfaction in Success?

To put the above into a framework worth considering or keeping in mind as you continue to scale through your journey, remember not to put such a heavy mental load on your own success. Again, I still haven't mastered this myself, so it's worth considering how you could handle it or at least remain conscious of it.

When it comes to capturing those moments of joy, keep these rules in mind:

• Remember the person you were before you started and how far you have come.

• Take a step back and look at the material world around you, and the position your hard work has put you in.

• Above all else, just try to remember where you came from.

I will update this with some more mental models once I have thought through this in more detail and figured out how you can prevent putting this mental pressure on yourself from the start—or maybe managing this friction is just a prerequisite you have to deal with when it comes to being someone who can achieve what they set out to build. I will explore these ideas more in future articles.

Note: I mention my trajectory so far and what I have done in the past. If you are interested in how I got here, you can read about that here: My Manifesto