It’s taken me years to change my mindset from thinking about my startup in days and weeks to thinking in months, quarters, and years.
Maybe it’s a reflection of where we are with Podia: stable, profitable, and growing.
But I’d like to think it’s more of a reflection of how I’ve grown as an entrepreneur into someone who understands that a business’ real value is in its long-term future, not its short-term results.
Building for the short-term can feel great, but building for the long-term is where you go from being a flashy TechCrunch story to being a business with lasting impact on the world.
But building for the long-term can mean that it can take a long time — it’s right there in the phrase! — before you feel like your strategy is paying off, which can be frustrating along the way.
It’s in our nature to seek immediate results (lose weight fast! earn money now!), but a skill you’ll need to learn as an entrepreneur is to give yourself the mental space to think in months, quarters, and years.
This may be a hard pill to swallow, but stop refreshing your metrics dashboard every ten minutes. That only sets you up to be disappointed — most likely by nothing more than random volatility — on a Tuesday night right before bed.
Put aside the anxiety you feel when you’re not hitting every single milestone you expect for yourself. Remember that it’s not only about what you accomplish today, but about making deposits, every single day, in service of your future success.
I don’t have a hack for you to adopt this mindset, but I hope by reading this that you start to think a little bit differently about how the long-term future of your startup is far more important than today’s short-term success.