Stay in the Fight: Starting and Keeping Your New Business From Home

We all know starting a business is hard. But what about it is hard? 

To start:
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• There are lots of competing priorities with limited resources.
• Others may not understand your vision.
• In order to succeed, you must face your weaknesses one way or another. Do not like doing sales? Get comfortable with it quickly or figure out a way around it. 
• You have to do everything. Nothing exists yet so you have to build it and take care of it. It is as if you start putting together a puzzle. Until you get the frame put together and some groupings of pieces, your progress is slow. Once you start to see the image more clearly, you figure out where each piece goes more easily and thus you move much faster. Imagine how much harder that puzzle would be without a picture on the box to guide you--some business ideas are akin to that. 

Starting a business on your own at home may be even harder because now you have to contend with:
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• Distractions that may be comforting: your tv, your bed/couch, your family, your pets, etc.
• Distractions that are useful for avoiding work: laundry, dishes, cooking, cleaning, etc. 
• If you are a solo business owner, you may not have accountability support. 
• It would be like starting a 5,000,000-piece puzzle with no guide picture. Where do you even start? Progress is incredibly slow. After days and days, months and months, years and years of working on it, you still may not even have a frame. You may have started to group similar pieces together and have an idea of what the picture is going to be, but you are essentially starting from scratch every day. You are doing this all while the distractions above compete for your attention. 

How do you stay motivated?

It is hard to stay motivated when you cannot see the progress and know if you are going in the right direction. Here are some tips:
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• Have faith. Know that momentum will build and that at some point that it will get easier.
• Find ways to deal with or accept your distractions. I discovered I was most productive in the mornings and thus scheduled all meetings for the afternoons in order to avoid the couch and Netflix. 
• Set schedules with your family, so they respect your work time.
• Get an accountability partner and a mentor.
• Focus on what you want to accomplish that day versus the whole business. In other words, focus on how many pieces you want to place in the puzzle that day versus looking at the whole puzzle and how much further you have to go.
•  Set up your work schedule, routine, and space how you want it and not how you think it is supposed to be. 
• Make it fun!

In the end, it takes endurance and perseverance when starting a business especially from home. You are not running a sprint but rather a marathon. Take your time. Find what solutions work best for you. The best thing you can do is keep searching for the most beneficial and motivating things that will keep you moving forward.