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Pick a Gear
Think about growing your business like driving a car.
The road to your end destination is winding, hilly, and varied, and it requires you to shift gears every now and then in order to most effectively navigate the terrain.
Sure, you can try to crawl up hills in fifth gear, and you just might have enough momentum to do it. But you might not. To avoid stalling out before you reach the summit, it might make more sense to downshift, simplify, and take on the hill in a gear better suited for the climb.
Likewise, when you hit an open, level straightaway, you can certainly drive in any gear you want, but you’ll make more progress, faster by shifting up to take advantage of the favorable conditions.
The mistake is not so much in choosing the wrong gear entirely, however. Most of us probably rarely feel that we are in precisely the right gear for our current conditions.
The mistake is to get caught between gears, to refuse to commit to a single gear in which to drive.
When we fail to commit, we can rev our engines all we want without moving ourselves forward, or worse, end up grinding the gears down to nothing as we frenetically try to jump between all of them without committing to any.
Any gear will get you where you’re looking to go, some faster, some slower, some more or less…
