A couple things that I have learned over the years of being an entrepreneur is that most of us are always pushing the envelope on ideas and consistently searching for new ways to build a better business.
This is where the challenge comes in.
With new ideas comes new business opportunities and how do you determine how green the grass is with those opportunities.
It is truly a mythical question that probably has no right answer, but I will take a stab at it for you.
In my young lad days, I wanted to take on every opportunity that presented itself and man did I lose a lot more than I gained being that naive.
Stretching myself so thin, resulted in a lot of Mediocre Ventures due to lack of what I refer to as Hyper Focus. Finally, I wised up and started developing a simple set of checkpoints that helped me determine how green that grass was to me.
The first thing I do is ask myself if this is something that will detract from my ultimate life goal or improve my ultimate life goal. If it’s the latter then I start to dig a tad deeper, but if it’s not then I don’t give it a second thought. Most opportunities don’t pass this test.
If it passes the first test, then the digging starts to determine how much time, focus, and energy it will take to turn that opportunity into a thriving, successful business (not mediocre). It starts with questions like this
- Are there partners involved and how many?
- Do I trust the people involved in the venture?
- How much capital is needed to get profitable?
- Do I need to be the driving force or strategist?
- Am I willing to live with the worst case scenario ending?
There are plenty others you should ask yourself, but either way I highly recommend writing out your answers and then sleeping on it after the Biz Euphoria wheres off.
It is during this stage that I remember the ole’ saying…your eyes are bigger than your stomach. It is tough to accept sometimes, but in reality time is limited and we need to use it wisely.
So to step back and answer the original question: Is the grass greener on the other side?
I would have to say most of the time for me it has proven NOT to be greener; it turns out to be a shiny object to distract me from my current path of domination.