What you can learn from my success (and failure).

3 Lessons from early success

In my life, I’ve experienced the blessing and the curse of finding early success in endeavors. While early success is always nice because it validates what you are working on, it can also slow you down. Here are three things I’ve learned from experiencing early success.

1. Don’t stop working on the basics.

In my 20’s, I was a professional minister. I worked with children and teens, and I quickly found I was naturally good at keeping the attention of a group of kids. This was both good and bad.

The good: I didn’t suffer too many lumps early on.
The bad: I wasn’t taught through failure to work hard to get better.

I can remember deciding that I wanted to learn ventriloquism after talking with a friend and seeing others do it so effectively. I got a book and an informational tape, brought them home with a puppet and…did nothing. In case you didn’t know, it’s hard to make a puppet look like they’re talking while your mouth stays still. It’s way too hard when you know you can simply do the same old things you’ve done with decent success and none of the hard work.

I missed out on an opportunity to be better and to grow. Success made it too easy on me.

2. Don’t lose track of early goals and desires.

In the book In the Long Run, Jim Axelrod lost sight of what he really enjoyed doing – meeting and interviewing interesting people – when he found early success.

Senior Portrait Artists found a lot of early success for various reasons but mostly because we were at the right place at the right time. A personal goal from the beginning was helping see people grow as a whole person – in all areas of their life.

As spa began to take off though, there were a lot of pulls on the organization from different sources. None of the pulls were wrong or bad, it simply wasn’t the goal I had in mind all along. I lost track of the vision I had for spa in the beginning.

The Collective is a way to regain that vision, and make a business all about photography, business, life.

3. Don’t over-reach.

I could write a book about this one, and I’ve definitely read a few (I specifically recommend How The Mighty Fall by Jim Collins and Me, Myself, and Bob by Phil Vischer). Dave Ramsey summed it up best with a recent tweet:

A little success can ruin a biz. Don’t use your first profit to buy equip. you don’t need yet! Start by renting/outsourcing!

Yesterday I wrote how success can be like a drug. Once you get that first hit, you just can’t stop doing everything possible to find more – including mortgaging your future. spa nearly went under in 2009 by making a $100,000 over-reach.

In 2 years spa had achieved our 5 year goals. Instead of sitting down and re-focusing on new goals and plans, we made several decisions based on past success. It nearly buried us, and took 2 years to dig completely back out from. It was easy to say we ran into a global recession, but the truth was we over-reached for success that may have come eventually had we been patient.

Life’s a marathon, not a sprint.

How many times have you heard that line? Sorry to be the one to bring it up again, but it’s true. Slow down, enjoy your success, but stay grounded. Determine to stay grounded and to keep growing.

Have you experienced early success that ended up being a negative? What has success taught you?

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The Senior Client Packet is a tool that you can use over and over again!