How Being Flawesome can Transform Your Business into a Masterpiece

“It’s not about chasing success; it’s about loving your medium long enough to create a masterpiece.” Tom Chi, co-founder of Google X, investor, and executive consultant.

As Chi underscores - don't be fooled by illusions such as achieving perfection or knowing all there is to know; rather, stay open-minded when learning new things so your medium (in our case, business and entrepreneurship) can blossom into a masterpiece! 

Yet, most business owners focus on mastery as a path to success versus learning and creating a masterpiece. That is, many seek success rather than seeking a masterpiece.

By focusing on success, we want the quickest path to success and adopt the illusion of success bound by logic. The illusion that success is a straight, logical, and linear path. 

This is highly paradoxical if you’ve studied success stories and put in the time to learn the details versus just the headlines - there isn’t a single story of success that is a straight path.  Usually, the story is full of obstacles, detours, surprises, burning things down to build them back, and hard-earned lessons combined into a masterpiece that didn’t even make sense until it became real.

Milton Hershey failed his apprenticeship as a printmaker; founded three candy production companies before founding the venture that would make chocolate accessible to the world. (I simply can not imagine a world without chocolate, can you?)

Or, what about Starbucks?  The founders applied for funding 276 times when looking to expand the company.  That’s 276 no’s, no thank yous, and ‘you must be crazy’ responses.  A company founded in 1971, it would take 25 years before their expansion turned a company into a brand.  Could you manage that many no’s?  Most business owners could not.

Thomas Edison was told he was stupid. Walt Disney was told he lacked creativity. Steve Jobs was kicked out of the company he founded. These are the stories that populate my google search, but what about all the stories about everyday entrepreneurs carving out their business masterpieces?

Those stories exist and we love to be a part of unsung heroes' stories.  It’s part of our vision to make those stories and the impact that they create possible and probable.

What keeps so many business owners on stay on the hamster wheel of the hustle and grind?

Simple, unchecked logical, and linear thinking.

Linear thinking and focusing on the illusion of success demands that you know the path to make the right decisions at the right time to avoid all mistakes, missteps, and failures along the way. 

In the quest to be right, you sacrifice progress for perfection.

Myself included.  I’ve walked down this path of futility. I’m a card-carrying member of Perfectionists Anonymous.  I lived a majority of my past deathly afraid of making mistakes and have carried around the personal responsibility for those mistakes in a way that can still send my blood pressure through the roof and have me hurling my guts because it just hurt that bad.  (Let’s be honest; challenges pop up in the dynamic environment. Want to handle them better?  Check out this article: 3 Ways to Minimize Every Business Challenge)

Here’s why we need a shift in how we pursue success.  Linear, logical thinking puts us in a situation where things go into one category or the other. We pit two opposites against each other: good or bad, right or wrong, success or failure.

Logic is handy - it allows us to filter, sort, and make decisions fast. Unchecked, it can limit our vision and the beautiful opportunities to create a business masterpiece.

That means embracing progress over perfection.  It means dropping “knowing” and choosing “learning.” It embraces being willing to break things down to build up a masterpiece.

Find the gems buried in the learning and collect them like puzzle pieces that initially seem unrelated but ultimately create the masterpiece.

In our world, we term this “Flawsome.” 

Flawsome is a mixture of flawed and awesome. Striving for perfection just beats you down. Striving to be a "flawed awesome" changes the whole energy of the learning process.  It allows a certain personal detachment from the results of figuring things out. 

This is the idea of finding the fabulous in the failure and using it to your advantage.

It means trusting in taking baby steps and allowing the path to reveal itself along the way.  Instead of trying to control all the variables in business, we trust that we will know the next step when we need to know the next step.

This is the secret sauce to how we can help you transform their businesses and be more flawsome.  The process is simple, but it is easy to get distracted along the way - that’s why we are here to help you stay the course, find the gems, and create a masterpiece of a business that can create predictable profits so you can grow and scale without burnout.

If you are looking to create more predictable profits so you can grow and scale without burnout, let’s chat. Feel free to send me a DM or find time on my calendar to make it happen.