I reflect on what it’s like setting out on the entrepreneurial journey – sometimes you are too excited to sleep as you are so full of possibility and dreams… and other times you can’t sleep because you are worried about what you have taken on and what you need to get done.
Sleep and entrepreneurship are not a natural fit… the only key is to make sure that you are not alone on your journey – have great peers, great advocates and advisors. But most importantly build a team of people around you who play to your non-strengths. Be relentless in loving and supporting these people. With them, you can change the world… without them, you are merely a lone voice in the world losing a lot of sleep.
“There were people who went to sleep last night,
poor and rich and white and black,
but they will never wake again.And those dead folks would give anything at all
for just five minutes of this weather
or ten minutes of plowing.So you watch yourself about complaining.
What you’re supposed to do
when you don’t like a thing is change it.
If you can’t change it,
change the way you think about it.”
– Maya Angelou
I realise some of my greatest ideas and thinking whilst I am asleep and it wakes me. I have to get out of bed and write it down, message it, email it, record it - its so exciting that I am wide awake and it feels soooo good. It also then lets me go back to sleep.
People then say "what were you doing working in the middle of the night?!!" And when they do it reminds me all over again how it felt. It lets me recount and recall and sing the ideas over again and I can share.
Bottom line, I only realise my dreams with other people, by other people and because others make them happen. You can't describe how goood that feels. Perhaps I really do live my dreams.