You Don´t Need a Why

We hear all the time how important it is to have a clear “why” in your life and business.

🧐 But have you ever thought about WHY you need a why?

Yes, I know the answer:

✔️ So you’ll be able to recall it when things are hard

✔️ So you can make sure all the decisions you’re making are taking you to in the right direction.

✔️ Etc.

Those are all fine. And I drank that kool-aid for a long time on all of that.

But here’s the problem:

IF what you’re doing is so personally challenging and painful that you have to remind yourself WHY you’re doing it, then you have a problem.

Most entrepreneurs don’t have a WHY problem. We have a HOW problem.

❌ If your pace is unsustainable, clarifying your why won’t help.

❌ If you’re over-working yourself, knowing WHY isn’t going keep you healthy.

❌ If you’re making less money than you need to be, spending more time than you want to be, and experiencing more stress than you should be — your why isn’t going to help.

Change your “how”.

✅ How you live your days is how you live your life.

I’ve burned out hard on this path, and I know from experience that when how you’re building your business and pursuing your goals is fun and balanced, the why takes care of itself.

Stop sacrificing yourself to a life you don’t love in order to gain a future that may never come.

Listen in here:

Software Generated Transcription:

Dan: Hey everybody. Welcome to The Meaning Movement Podcast, season 11. I’m so excited to kick off this season with you. I’ve got a few things here for you today, some updates on this season and the upcoming season, and some big changes that are coming down the pipe for you. I can’t wait to share them with you.

And secondly, just an idea to, for you to take even here today and apply to how you go about doing your work, building your business, living your life. So if that sounds good, let’s get on into it. I’m. Dan Cumberland, this is the Meaning movement. Let’s go. First things first. We have a sponsor for this podcast for this season as well as likely coming seasons, and it’s a big five figure sponsorship and I’m so excited to announce that nine 20 three.co, the web and uh, web app and mobile app development agency that I have been working with building video snap along.

What I’m doing here with the Meaning movement is coming on as a sponsor, and as a part of that, I’m also joining their team As a product strategist, what does all that mean? One, it means that you’ll hear more about 9, 2, 3 moving forward, but then secondly, if you are building or want to build any sort of web or mobile app or know someone that.

I could get a chance to work with you on that. So let me know. You can reach out to meet [email protected]. I’m just so excited to be doing this with 9 23. The sponsorship is just huge for the meaning movement. We’ve never had a deal like this before, so it’s just really, I’m meaningful to use that word, to be doing this, to have them coming alongside and then second.

Their team is just so fantastic, and I love building product. I love making dreams come to life, and so I’m just thrilled for the chance to work with anyone, people like you who might be out there building stuff and making sure that we’re building the right thing for the right market, for the right client, for the right end user, and all of that.

So just huge, huge news for us. I hope you’ll, uh, celebrate. With me. The second piece of news is that the Meaning movement continues to evolve over the last season. If you’ve been listening to the short episodes that are titled F T M M, finding the Meaning Movement that I’ve been recording, building in public style with my friend Raj, you’ll know how I’ve been wrestling with who am I trying to serve and how can I better serve them?

How can I better serve you? And we’ve really focused in on entrepreneurs as. Target demographic. The people that I feel like I’m best equipped to serve, because that’s me. Those are the conversations that I already love. Having. The people, the guests that I typically have on the show often fall into that category.

So why not just embrace that and bring more of this material into a specific focus to solve those? Problems that, that we all face as entrepreneurs, really the idea is this, that we all start our businesses to get a few things. We start down the entrepreneurial path to have less stress, to make more money, to have more freedom.

But the problem is we often end up with. None of those things in a bit of a prison of our own making, we’ve burned our bridges, if you will, and become maybe even unhirable. At least it might feel that way and feel trapped. Giving our life, sacrificing our day to day to a life that we don’t love in order to build a business that might take us somewhere where we wanna go in the future, but not in this moment right now, which results in burnout.

It results in million dollar mistakes and results in living a life that we. Love too much stress, too much sacrifice of the present in order to build a future that we may never actually ever get to see because something might happen between now and then because the ideas that we’re working on might not actually work, might not come into fruition.

We have to manage all of that. Risk along the way. So what the meaning movement is about, is about giving entrepreneurs the insight that we need to recalibrate our work life balances, to have the energy and motivation to keep going and build businesses and lives that we love. And that is what this project is all about.

That is the direction that we’re going. So throughout this season, we’re kind of trick. Into trickling out that mission, and then in the next season we’re gonna be tackling it head on with new formats, some new co-hosts, and all kinds of other things. I’m so excited just to be here. If you want to hear more context for that journey in my own life of focus, of Nicheing, all of that, you can go back to finding the Meaning Movement.

The Finding the Meaning movement series in your player. Just look for F T M M at the beginning of those episodes. I hope all of that makes. I hope that my process of building in public is helpful for you as you think about where you are in your life and your business and what’s next. I’m doing my best to share my struggles and victories along the way to help you in your struggles and your victories along the way.

So this idea I wanted to share with you that been bouncing around in. Mind. I used to go to this yoga class. It would be three times a week at 6:00 AM six to 7:00 AM It was yoga with weights, hot yoga with weights. So you’re in this hot room holding these weights, eight to 20 pounds. They’re not heavy weights, but you’re holding them in these yoga poses that can make it just.

Really excruciating. And our teacher, who would, would teach those classes. His name was Jamie. He was awesome. Jamie, thanks for all the great classes he had. This ability to know just when things are just really hard, he would say, remember? Why you’re here? Like right when you’re ready to give up, right? When you’re just saying to yourself, I can’t do this any longer.

I can’t hold this anymore. He would say, remember why you are here. And I’ve taken that and, and come back to it so many times throughout my life. And I’m doing something that feels hard when I feel discouraged, when I feel like. Quitting. Just to come back to and remember, why have I started? Why did I start this podcast?

Why did I start a business? Why did I start down this path? Whatever that project might be, to come back to the why behind it helps refocus and helps you sustain your energy in the midst of a really challenging. But I’ve had this realization, and this is the piece that’s, that’s been haunting me, that the more I check in with my why, the more I find myself needing to ask that question of why am I here?

Why am I doing this? That there’s a correlation between that and the, the, and a, an unsustainable. Pace. To put it another way, the more you have to ask yourself why you’re doing something, the more out of alignment, the how of how you’re doing It might be. And I know that for many of us, we’re mission driven people, entrepreneurs, leaders, business leaders.

We know we have big, big visions for what we want to accomplish in the world. And that’s what drives us. And I really believe that there’s power in having clarity around your why. Like Simon Cenex book. Start With Why He Has That pot or that, that Ted talk on that same idea. It’s one of the most popular Ted Talks.

It’s, it’s made this concept, a household word, household idea, everyone know. The power of the why, but what I want to draw attention to is that I think that we can overemphasize our why. To the detriment of our how, because we are so focused on our big vision on chasing after an impact of changing the world, that we sacrifice everything unto that goal.

And so there’s a correlation here. That you need to pay attention to how often you’re asking yourself, why am I here? And the more you do, the more out of alignment that how might be. Here’s why this matters. I’m recording this on December 4th, 2022. It’s, it’s a Sunday, late morning one, just over a week ago was Thanksgiving in the United States, and I woke up on Thanksgiving Day with extreme.

Pain in my abdomen, went to the hospital, spent 36 hours my Thanksgiving. That to me, I expected to be spending with family, was instead spent alone in a hospital. And I’m not telling you this for pity. It’s what it is, what it was. Uh, I’m, I’m, um, trying to figure out, I’m going to specialists now trying to figure out everything that happened and make sure this doesn’t happen again.

But the point isn’t that the point is, All we have is right now. And while I believe in chasing audacious dreams and achieving big things in life, you can’t solely do that at the sacrifice of your day to day of your life right now. The only thing you have right now is right. The only thing you have is the present moment.

And our temptation as people with big visions, as people that are ambitious is to give it all, to lay it all on the line in order to accomplish that vision. And while it’s very appropriate to do that in a yoga class, to leave it all on the mat and, and remember why you’re here, it’s only gets you so. In your life, in your business, in your pursuits.

Eventually that will catch up with you. Eventually you’ll end up burnt out, you’ll end up exhausted. You’ll end up feeling like you just can’t do it again. So yes. Have your why. Know your why. Hold close to your why, but also pay close attention to your how I’m launching an accelerator to help mission driven entrepreneurs with these things starting.

In January. The idea is that we, as entrepreneurs go into our businesses to get, we start down the entrepreneur path to find more freedom, to have less stress, to make more money, and we often end up with none of those in a bit of a prison of our own making, sacrificing our day to day lives to a, a life that we, we don’t love in order to achieve this future that may never come.

Because of a health issue, because of the, just the problem we’re trying to solve is too hard to solve because of any number of things. The Meaning movement. This podcast, this project, is about helping you get the insights that you need to recalibrate your life and your business so that you can have the energy and motivation.

To keep going, to avoid the million dollar mistakes of quitting too early, of selling your business, of selling your soul, whatever it might be to avoid burnout and all of those things. So I’m starting an accelerator starting in January of 2023. If you’d like to be a part of it, go to the meaning movement.com/start.

You’ll find an assessment there, a burnout assessment that’ll give you your personal burnout score. That’ll basically tell you how out of alignment is your how from your. But regardless if that’s a good fit for you or something that’s interesting to you, I hope you’ll take this idea and take it to your everyday life and ask this question.

How often do I have to remember why? Because the more you have to remember the bigger of a problem it might be. This, of course, is the Meaning Movement podcast. Thank you for listening. We’ll be back with you in just a few days, and throughout this season, we’ll be releasing two episodes a week. If this episode, if this idea has meant something to you or any episode of the podcast, it asks you to take a quick moment and leave a rating review wherever you listen in. iTunes or Apple Podcast is super helpful. Amazon, Spotify, all of those places have places for you to leave reviews. That’s how people like you find this show. Personally, I find it so, so meaningful. Hit that subscribe button if you’re not subscribed. If you’re on YouTube, also hit that like button. Thank you so much and I’ll be back with you in just a few days.