This weekend we took a trip to our former state, and with a little extra time on our hands we swung by the first house my wife and I owned. The one we lived in when we were first married and brought our first two kids home to.
It’s been 7 years since I’ve seen any of it, so it was that weird feeling where something is extremely familiar, but completely foreign at the same time.
When we drove by the old house, I was flooded with memories. The kids in the blue kiddy pool in the front yard… Lucy, the stray cat we adopted… the summer we spent drenched in sweat building the fence ourselves to save money… and just how proud we were of our little home.
But what really stood out is how far we’d come since then.
I don’t want to be ungrateful — it was a great starter home — but I couldn’t imagine living there today. It was an instant perspective shift I didn’t anticpate and couldn’t fake.
All I could hear was my buddy Jim Martin saying “measure backwards”.
As business owners, we’re always looking to the future. Chasing the next goal, the next client, the next milestone. It’s a cycle that traps you into always feeling behind since everything we want is perpetually out of reach.
But it’s not because we haven’t accomplished our goals, it’s because we keep moving the finish line.
But slow-rolling down my old street forced me to stop and measure backards. To look where we started. To think about what we’ve built. To realize just how much we’ve learned along the way.
No, we haven’t reach every goal. We never will.
But the you who started your business would not believe what you’ve been able to pull off since then.
When you’re self-employed, there’s no boss to pat you on the back. No performance review. No “Employee of the Month” plaque.
No one else is going to hand us validation… we’re responsible for creating it for ourselves.
So, the next time you’re beating yourself up about a slow month or a project gone sideways, remember; you’re not stuck, you’re just zoomed in on the day.
Zoom out, and you’ll realize you’ve been climbing the whole time… and you’re miles from where you started.
