This week’s question from our portal “Ask Us Anything” comes from Ashlee:
After quarterly meetings, I come back energized and start thinking bigger, wanting to get far, fast. How do I balance thinking big and wanting to accelerate toward a goal, like beating my revenue target by a certain date even when my budget projections don’t currently support that, without overdoing it or skipping the steps that actually let me succeed?
Stay focused on whatever your goal currently is. This is the anchor for everything else I’m about to say, because the energy you get from a quarterly meeting is real and valuable, but it’s also exactly the kind of moment where people abandon a perfectly good goal in progress because a shinier one just walked in the door. The excitement itself isn’t the problem. What you do with it is.
If you get exposed to something new that excites you, something you think would be really cool to do, set that as the next goal after you accomplish the one you’re already working on. Don’t discard it, don’t ignore it, just don’t let it jump the line ahead of the commitment you’re already in the middle of.
Make a list, as long as you want, of every idea that excites you or that you get exposed to. Write it down, and you can decide later whether to pursue it or not. This does two things. First, it honors the excitement, you’re not suppressing the idea or pretending you don’t want it. Second, it takes the pressure off the current moment, because you know the idea isn’t lost, it’s just waiting its turn. You might come back to that list in three months and realize half of it doesn’t excite you anymore, and that’s fine too, that’s part of the filtering process.
But don’t let it interrupt the goal you’re currently working toward, because that’s exactly how bright shiny object syndrome takes hold, and you end up accomplishing nothing. This is the trap for ambitious, ideas-driven people especially. Every new exposure feels like a signal that you should pivot, and if you follow every signal, you never actually finish anything, you just accumulate a graveyard of half-started projects and goals that all felt exciting in the moment.
As for wanting to accelerate the timeframe itself, wanting to hit your revenue number faster than your current projections suggest is realistic, put that acceleration energy into the goal you already have, specifically, rather than splitting it across multiple new ideas. The instinct to move faster is good, it’s useful fuel, but it needs to be pointed at the thing you’re already building toward, not diffused across every new possibility that shows up right after a meeting that got you fired up. Concentrate the intensity, don’t scatter it.
