Wade Wachs

If you didn’t make it through my first post in this series, I don’t blame you. What was supposed to be a 300-word post turned into 2000. Long story short, I have an assignment to publish a blog a week for the next 14 weeks based on the readings in my Introduction to Entrepreneurship class at BYU-Idaho. Those assignments are being published on my blog.

As I write this, it is 5 o’clock in the morning on a Saturday. The day ahead of me is full of scout camp preparations, work and family commitments, school assignments, tending 3 small children, car maintenance, house maintenance, and 5-6 hours of driving in between all of those things. Today is a full day.

So what did I do first thing this morning? I worked on my wife’s business. It was a small step really, I just needed to login to her website. The password had been lost, the emails broken, so it was somewhat of a manual process to login to the servers to identify a path in. It’s something I have needed to do for months, but have never stopped to take the 10 minutes it took to do so. It really wasn’t that hard. It was such a small step. Why haven’t I done it before today?

Just like today, there is always something else to take my attention. For months, the todo list has been filled with items more pressing, more important, or more interesting at the top. Today could easily have been the same, but what changed?

All of this semester, we have been reading about the difficulties and trials that come with entrepreneurship. We have read and discussed topics around keeping your life in balance, and focussing on your priorities. We have written bucket lists and set goals. As I was discussing all of these topics with some family members at dinner last month, we all started sharing some of our own entrepreneurial goals and aspirations. All of us however put them in context of future things that we would do when we had the time, or energy to do them.

So I extended a challenge. We all should set a specific entrepreneurial goal. We each identified a single step that we could take before our next family dinner to push our entrepreneurial goals forward. These goals were literally written down on the back of a paper plate, a picture was taken and we were off.

One of those many commitments on my list today is that family dinner tonight. Guess what my goal was for this month. Exactly, it required logging into my wife’s website to help her make some changes for her business to fuel growth and expansion. The accountability to my family to meet this goal pushed me forward to finally tackle this small step that has needed doing for months.

I’m looking forward to get us all together tonight. Not only will we get to discuss everyone’s progress over the last month, but we also plan to set another goal to tackle before our next dinner. I believe this group will become a hub for pushing all of us forward into entrepreneurial pursuits, and I can’t wait.