Faithful when the Amounts are Small

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Once when noted business philosopher, Jim Rohn, was asked the most important advice he would want to leave with new entrepreneurs, he said, "be faithful when the amounts are small." Over the years I have found it to be excellent advice. The truth is, many of us have fanned the flames to keep a dream alive in our hearts; we have had great ideas that we were/are convinced would take the world by storm; we were pretty sure that we could and would attract investors with our novel startup ideas..only to find that reality had some very different ideas about what could become of our dreams. We are unable to attract the start-up capital we envisioned; readers are not as excited about your blog as you though they would be.....your website has been up and 'running' but it has not been attracting the kind of traffic you were expecting.....and, to add a little of the trivial, the numbers of facebook likes and adds you were sure you would be getting have just not materialized. Life sucks sometimes...too often....I know.

So I think right about this point is where I remind you of Jim's great advice. Press on. Be faithful when the amounts are small. Small amounts matter. They add up. Once, as I taught a class in entrepreneurship, and we discussed the concept of failure, a student asked "when do you know it's time to stop...if your results continue to fall short of your expectations, when do you pull back and call your venture a failure?" Without thinking too much about it, I found myself telling him, "when the fire inside you dies." As long as the dream still inspires you, as long as you are still able to will yourself to do the tasks, push through the mindset that tells you the results aren't worth it. The results will compound over time. But it's crucial that you remain faithful.

If you are a wee bit spiritual (as I like to think I am...yeah, a wee bit) and you make the scriptures your reference point, you will find a verse over in the Old Testament that says, "Do not despise the day of small beginnings..." Point underscored. It's important not to be discouraged by the size of either the input or the output early in the game. And who is to say how long that period of small beginnings will last? Maybe that dream you are 'birthing' needs a longer gestation period. What's important is that you do all it takes to keep the dream alive.

One important lesson I have learnt over time is that the dreams we easily stop pursuing were never meant to happen. Contrarily, there are those of us who have a dream pursuing us...ones we don't have the luxury of releasing as they refuse to release us. So even though we get discouraged by poor results, even though others are not seized with the essence of our desires, even though we find ourselves in the ring alone...we dare not be discouraged by small beginnings. We press on. We remain faithful when the amounts are small. We continue in the arena....We continue to dare greatly.