The *MAIN* Mistake I Made When I Started A Business...

For as long as Aspen has been Aspen, I’ve been a “business-mindset” type of girl. At the ripe age of 5 I was building out business plans and typing up ideas to send to my parents. I wasn’t great in school, constantly working to check the box on any assignment or test just to mark it done on my to do list. I was always thinking so much bigger than an exam or a paper I had to write. My mind was elsewhere, deep in my “business ideas” notebook or fixated on my current obsession (whatever it was at any given moment).

Maybe it was a swimwear line (age 15) or a new restaurant concept (age 18). It was likely a new app (age 20) or innovative idea of some sort (ages 5-30).

While I was fixated on the latest and greatest in my mind, I was also constantly striving to be the best in what I was passionate about. It’s funny, really, because while I couldn’t care less about my grades, I was damn sure that I’d be the best leader and captain on my D1 team in college. If I was competing in something, I’d do whatever it took to be the one. If I wasn’t on a leaderboard of some sort during my sales career, what was the point? Nobody saw me.

I needed to be seen.

On top of everything, my brain has always been moving fast, sometimes to a fault. The overwhelm of trying to do 10 things as once is like being in a pressure cooker, but if you aren’t doing them all at once, you’ll forget 3 of them. But, because I am moving so quickly, I forget the past easily and I am able to take a lot of risk. This allows me to stay in action… I’ve always had a “do then think” mentality when it comes to making decisions. Some people become paralyzed by fear or what-ifs, but those unknowns empower me to lean in and move quickly.

Much of this quick action and lack of fear has propelled me to places I had only dreamed of as a little girl, but without a doubt, it has also introduced some detrimental effects.

Before I FINALLY found my current relationship with my work (you’ll learn all about this within each mistakes learnings how I have recovered), I had at least 3 years of total and utter addiction and obsession with being seen as successful instead of actually being my actual version of successful. As you can imagine, this led to what I now know real, true burnout is and it resulted in long-term physical side effects that I am still working to reverse.

So, I made a vow to myself things would be radically different when I found my current company, Rêve Studios, and in today’s post we’re going to go deep on my mistakes and how I learned from them. I’m hoping that anyone in the early stages can take action NOW to avoid detrimental effects later.

Let’s dig in.

We as business owners are passionate. Our brands are our whole world… right? I’ve since figured out that, no, my business is not my whole world, in fact, it’s just a tiny fraction of my world.