Just take the next step.
The world is so loud sometimes. Conflict, demand, pressure. Everyone wants something from me I can’t give them, or if I do give them what they want, it will break me. Too many demands, not enough units of me to go around. Forgiveness is in short supply, there’s no room for error. Any sign of weakness, some vulture is prepared to rip it apart. Demand for this, demand for that.
The pressure and the weight of the expectations can be stifling at times.
And the noise gets louder, in my experience, the closer you are to a breakthrough.
Sometimes it can be blinding. Debilitating. Paralyzing. Suffocating. But only sometimes. Most times it is exciting, challenging and empowering to meet pressure with focus, chaos with clarity and to make the impossible possible and push yourself to grow to the next level of leadership, stewardship and consciousness. I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
But I would never tell someone to build a company they kind-of cared about. If you don’t love it, if you aren’t prepared to surrender everything you are, everything you have in you and to push yourself to a breaking point again and again and again – don’t do it.
I should qualify that. Something most people often don’t understand, particularly those who have many opinions about who, what and how I’m doing things, is that I am not in the game of business. I hate business, frankly. Can’t stand it for the most part. View it as a necessary evil. Something I’m required to do in order to get what I want. I am not in the business of business. I am in the business of building Greatness.
And Greatness isn’t for the fickle, the faint of heart, the weak stomached or the half-committed.
Each new level brings more challenges, more problems, more pressures and more conflict. Are you prepared for what it will take, what you’ll have to give and how much of yourself you’ll need to transform to get there?
You cannot build Greatness and not completely transform yourself in the process. It is impossible. You will turn yourself inside out more than a few times along the way – you have to push yourself, discipline yourself, focus yourself, manage your mind, direct your thoughts, believe in yourself, set your consciousness and conquer your sabotage. Or you won’t make it.
The lines are not blurred at this level of the game. Black and white. An inch out of alignment, at this level, is a mile in consequence.
Everything matters. Every step matters. Every distraction has consequence.
And when you hit a wall and you can’t go around, under, over or move it. You will have no choice but to go through it. One painstaking, heart-wrenching, bone-crushing step at a time.
Walls can be made of all sorts of things. They can be made of your history, your belief systems, your fears, your insecurities. Your haters, your mistakes, your bad choices, your failures. They can be made from external sources or internal. They can be 5 feet thick and 10 feet tall, or 2 inches in all directions.
Walls are designed to keep something in or keep something out.
And the thing about most walls is, you can’t really move forward when you’re faced with one. They keep you stuck. You can spend a lot of time being stuck. Trying to figure out a way around, but in the end: the only way out, is through.
And so forward we go.
Just taking one more step. And then another. Like breathe. In…and out. Forward.
Krystine McInnes is CEO and Project Director of Athena Farms and Grown Here Farms. Stewarding purpose-driven, change-making projects with a focus on Planet, People, Profit and a commitment to Sustainable Business models.
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