Darren told me his high school accounting teacher had a sign posted beside the classroom clock that read: “Time will pass. Will you?” Truth. As far as classroom motivational posters go, this entry is top shelf: a reminder to bored, pre-smartphone, clock-watching students that they would be weighed and measured. It fits with what I know of the accounting profession. Accountants are trained to keep tune with events and to keep score in business. It’s their special way of seeing the world.
In school, the concept of pass and fail and how you go about doing one or the other is more or less laid out. You’re led by the hand from one stage to the next. You have to meet some external standard, yes, but you’re spared the burden of deciding things for yourself. Later, in working life, you’re expected to make choices, and the line that separates pass and fail becomes fuzzy. Grown ups, when free and able to do so, keep score in different ways.
Money is a popular choice. Money is a store and a proxy of value. It can be exchanged for practically any want or need. It can be made, measured, added up, and compared. It’s relative, but it’s also objective. With money, you know where you stand.
Career is another option. It’s the world’s most popular massively multiplayer role-playing game: choose a character, explore worlds, face and overcome challenges, move up levels, gain new powers. Money still matters, but the career is the touchdown, money is the extra point.
Some people go down less traveled paths. A rare few blaze new trails. Others just watch the clock, neither passing nor failing, never committing, never really joining the game. I’ve learned it’s important to leave wide margins when considering someone else’s story; circumstances vary — and life events can leave the best of us stunned.
People typically want a larger meaning to their lives than the making and having of money. There has to be more to all of it for any of it to really matter, right?
Sure. But money will have its say.
Money colors the whole canvas of adult life. It opens up or closes off possibilities. It chooses your house, your things, the things you do; it chooses your friends, your colleagues, your community, who you do things with. It chooses the places you go and the places you stay, the sights you see and the parts you don’t. Money is unavoidable.
This is certainly the case if you’re an entrepreneur, and especially so if you own a small business. Money is like oxygen and water and happiness, tough to live without. You may not appreciate its central role when you start. The startup stage is peak optimism. You’ve got a great idea. You’re full of ideas. It’s all about ideas. You’re going to make something people will want and take off like a rocket ship. Matt Damon’s telling you: Fortune Favors the Brave.
But give it a few month ends and money moves in, locks Damon in the basement, and cranks its tunes to ten. You think you’re chasing money, but it’s really chasing you, reminding you day and night, “I live here now!” Customers don’t show, a big customer doesn’t pay on time, a project falls through, a pipe bursts, the world shuts down. At some point, unless you’re very lucky, very good, or already rich, there’s going to be too much month at the end of the money. It’s always on you to make the ends meet.
So it’s easy to become discouraged as a small business owner. It’s easy to lose focus.
You’re caught in the whirlwind of business life in your small, handcrafted boat. You stop thinking about where you wanted to go, what you wanted to achieve. Instead, you search for calm water, you reach for an anchor, some routine, to try to hang on to. You get to a sort of equilibrium where the money doesn’t really grow, but it also doesn’t really run out. You stick to routine and survive.
But time will pass, and, even if the money doesn’t run out, time will. Keeping time means simply being aware of it. Every day you fail to grasp what drives the results for your business is a day lost. Every month you fail to work on improving those results is a month lost. Every year you fail to benefit from all of your work and your sacrifice is a year lost. Losses measured in days, months, years are impossible to make whole.
As a small business owner, you’re building. Your goal isn’t to just survive. Your goal is to build your character, your understanding, and your abilities so you can succeed. You build yourself to build your business.
Time will pass. Will you? An important question, isn’t it?
Darren’s accounting teacher was helping his students understand the weight of their choices. And that results come from focus. Becoming a small business owner is a choice, a choice that carries an uncommon amount of weight, a choice that requires an uncommon amount of focus. Once you’ve made the choice, you have to carry the load, you have to try, you have to understand, you have to fight clear of apathy and inertia, i.e., watching the clock, avoiding the score.
What’s the point otherwise? I mean, you could always spend your ultimately limited time doing something else, keeping score some other way.