To pursue something difficult you will need commitment, focus, and confidence. You will need the promise of gaining a significant outcome and a sense of fulfillment.
If your goals do not move you, if they do not inspire and incite you to action, then you have not found the right goals.
Lacey Benton has worked for, and run, a long list of small businesses in the Baltimore area. Unfortunately, after a while she realized her heart wasn’t in it. “I could do these jobs, and do them well, but I began to question if they were right for me, if they were what I wanted to do.”
While Lacey had enjoyed working with youth groups, she never saw the possibility to make a career out of her efforts. That is, until a community center called the Village Learning Place invited her to oversee its plans to rent out part of its building to create a small café. The rent money would enable the group to expand its programs, and Lacey was asked to help find a suitable tenant.
Then Lacey took their conversation in a whole new direction. “You have teenagers here looking for something worthwhile to do, and you have a space that you’d like to rent to generate some income. Forget about renting it. Let’s create a café ourselves,” Lacey told the group’s board. She proposed letting the teens be involved in every aspect of the operation, while she would use her years of small business experience to make sure it ran smoothly.
With that, Lacey put together a group of teens who learned about the business by visiting other cafés and reading about the subject. The idea of teaching business skills to teens was so intriguing that the center was able to attract grant money to help pay start-up costs of the business. Soon, the Youth Entrepreneur Café, serving coffee and juice, was up and running.
Lacey loves teaching the children about their options in life, that whether they pursue business or something else, “Life is a choice, as opposed to something that happens to them.”
As for Lacey, when the mind and heart are focused on the same thing, “I can do anything. Watch me.”
When end-of-career managers discussed their relative success and moments of peak performance during their careers, more than half spoke in terms of the significance of personal fulfillment.
Thornton, Privette, and Bundrick 1999