Celebrating little successes is important.
They help you measure whether you are making progress towards your goals, especially if these goals take time to develop (like a creative endeavor or building up an innovative new business).
In the video above, I talk about an example from my own life, before I was successful, and how I used a simple pizza as a way to measure progress
When I had just started Improvides Consulting, I started from Zero.
I had just left behind a well-paying job in Management Consulting, doing planning and program management.
The step into the realm of innovation management and creativity science was less of a step, and more of a full-on dive into a vast new ocean.
I had no contacts in the industry, nobody knew who I was, I needed to start from scratch.
And the first few months left me feeling quite lost.
I was spending a lot of time being “busy” building the company.
This involved things like putting the website together.
Deciding what the logo should look like.
What the fonts and colour schemes should be.
Going to networking events.
And writing articles about the science behind innovation and creativity.
It quickly turned out that I was overlooking a crucial aspect that so many entrepreneurs fall victim to: a lack of clarity on what actions are actually going to make your new endeavor successful.
So I set out to ask myself how I could gauge success, and progress towards it.
I was in the process of building my first eLearning product, and I asked myself what I would do if it started to bring in income.
And what I came up with may surprise you.
You see, I love pizza.
[Doesn’t everyone?]
But I have a soft spot for Domino’s, especially their meat lovers and pepperoni.
There was a problem though.
In London, getting a Domino’s delivered was expensive.
At the time, it would have been about 20 Pounds for an extra large pizza, and so I had foregone the pleasure while I had been living off savings and building the business.
To me, the idea of being able to think that I can afford to treat myself by spending more than I should on a pizza first felt a bit crazy.
But it wasn’t about the pizza itself.
What it represented was that the business was making progress, that people were learning about who I was and respected my insights enough to pay me for them.
So I would use the ability to use the profit from my eLearning course to buy an extra-large Domino’s pizza as a milestone, to show that I was making process.
A way to celebrate the first little success.
And once the course started making a profit, I did indeed get that Victory Pizza.
Here is a picture of the actual pizza. I was so happy that I wanted to keep it as a sweet memory.
The actual Victory Pizza, in all its mouth-watering goodness
And boy, did it taste good.
So now it’s your turn.
Let me know in the comments below what your equivalent of the victory pizza is? How do you measure small victories and progress?
What did you do the first time your ideas finally started making an income?
I look forward to reading your response.
Nick Skillicorn
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