Running Away or Running Toward: The Mindset Shift Every Entrepreneur Needs to Make

Probably one of the wisest things I have ever heard.

You are either running away from something or running toward something.

The premise is simple. The feelings of pain, dread and regret, or the feelings of excitement, possibility and purpose, will eventually become strong enough to make you want to change. One of them will always win. The question is which one is driving you.

I hated my job as a tradesman.

Not mildly disliked it. Really, genuinely hated it. At the time I thought that was a bad thing. I thought I had wasted that entire segment of my life sitting in misery going nowhere.

It was not until I met a wise man on a beach in Esperance, Western Australia, that my perspective shifted completely.

He made me realise something I had never considered. Without the misery of feeling stuck and lost for that period of my life, I likely never would have changed direction at all. The discomfort was not a waste. It was the fuel.

The pain of staying still has to become greater than the fear of moving forward.

I started my journey because I was running away from a life of unfulfillment and lack of control. A life without real choice. Without compromise. And the further I got from that old life the better everything around me felt.

Eventually I got so good at running away from what I did not want that I learned something even more powerful. How to run toward what I did.

A life filled with choice, purpose, community and impact.

The dread of the old life made Dale Meyer start running. The excitement of the new one is what keeps the Pumas on the pavement.

So here is Lesson 3.

If you keep finding yourself lost, going in circles, starting things and stopping them, unable to get traction, ask yourself these two questions honestly:

What are you running away from?

And what are you running toward?

One of those answers will tell you everything about why you started. The other will tell you everything about whether you will finish.

You need both. The pain to get you moving and the vision to keep you there.

This is the kind of conversation we have every episode on the TSP Podcast. Real talk about the journey from startup to passive with Dale Meyer. Listen on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and join us in The Sequoia Project community on Facebook.