This morning I read several great interviews with very impressive young business women. I shared the article about Kat Cole below. Kat Cole is 34 years old and has already worked her way from Hooters girl to CEO of Cinnabon. The other article was about Alexa von Tobel, the 30 year old founder of multi-million dollar startup LearnVest.
After reading these articles my first reaction was awe. Then I felt inspired. Then I started to feel… inadequate… ? I started to think, wow, these women are around my age and are already leaders in the business world, and here I am still in school. So on and so forth as the self doubt parade started marching through my head.
But then I stumbled on this excerpt:
One of the great temptations for us as leaders and dreamers is to compare the start of our new adventures to the middle of someone else’s. You work on your first book and pick up Max Lucado’s 14th book and say, “Mine isn’t as good.” You post your first blog post and look at Michael Hyatt’s 100th and think, “Mine is nowhere near as great as that.” You give your first speech and watch Ken Robinson’s 1,000th at TED and think, “I’m not great like that.”
It’s true. You’re not. Yet.
This is just your beginning. Give yourself the gift of time. Love your dream and your adventure enough to allow it to grow slowly.
-Click here for full post from Michael Hyatt
Matthew Cheuvront, the blogger at Lifewithoutpants.com, poignantly summed up this quote when he wrote:
We have the innate ability (to which I blame a lot on social media and constantly being flooded with the awesome, incredible, and/or otherwise stupendous things other people are doing) – to compare ourselves, in everything we do – to what someone else is doing or has done.
We constantly compare our beginning to someone else’s middle. Our middle to someone else’s end. And when you do that – you’ll find that you’re never, ever satisfied. You’ll never, ever be good enough. You’ll always struggle to celebrate your accomplishments.
So true… So true.
Kat is pretty active on twitter, she responded quite quickly when I had a gripe about their “pizzabon”. I still stand by my opinion, but it was refreshing to get a timely response from a C level exec.
Wow, she IS a fast responder on Twitter. She seems to really understand the importance of being personally connected with the public. You are right, very refreshing.
Reblogged this on The Best Things Happen … while you're dancing and commented:
It’s weird when you stumble upon something that reflects your mental state so perfectly. Take 35 seconds to read this post, it’s a good one.