Your time is coming.

Trust the process. Your time is coming.  Just do the work, and the results will handle themselves. – Tony Gaskins

A story of growing up.

Do you remember being 12 or 13, and your mother or father would say things that you didn’t quite understand? Like “Those are just Growing Pains,” or “you’ll know when you grow up,” and “just wait until you’re a parent.”

In our youth and our innocence, we just laugh these things off or meet them with a never-present sense that it’s too long into the future and nowhere near today.

Our parents and most adults go through a Rite of Passage that provides them with Knowledge and Wisdom and a dry sense of humor.

Then, you’re 18 – unending freedom and still wet behind the ears! You’re starting to get some of the things your parents said.

Then, you’re 27 – J.O.B., partner, car note, maybe your first or second on the way. Now the things your parents said are starting to make sense.

Beyond life experience and doing what’s typical, you changed when you became an adult.

We bring this up because starting a business can almost feel like going back to being a snot-nosed-awkward teenager again. The innocence, youth, and awkwardness included.

Trust the process. Your time is coming: Every parent says to a child who doesn’t understand the fullness of life that only experience can reveal.

What does this mean for business?

First, to conclude the story:

Growing and maturing in a career takes patients and aptitude. Depending on the organization or the career field, it also takes wits and sometimes “office politics.” By doing this, you can become comfortable in the semi-predictable environment that an excellent job has to offer, even if this is an illusion.

Growing and maturing in a business takes character. Being a teenager growing into your own is founded on (and concluded by achieving) character – not “25-steps to conclude childhood.”

When lacking a step-by-step guide, sometimes the only thing you can do is just “never give up” and “being honest to a fault.”

When starting a business, there are very few rules and even fewer actual steps. Breaking into new markets or going toe-to-toe with a competitor has no step-by-step tactical playbook.

You’ll win, you’ll fail, you’ll learn. That’s life growing up; that’s business every day.