I love digging holes on the beach, but I never thought to build a sand turtle.

I love digging holes on the beach, but I never thought to build a sand turtle.

(And yes, I will likely keep sharing photos from my recent beach vacation because I cannot get enough of the beach. Sorry not sorry. 🤣)

This kid, I'll call him Joey, was digging and building and designing what was ultimately a sand turtle, because that was the vision he had in his mind. There was no one else on that stretch of sand. Just his imagination and his internal operating system, running with zero interference. 🐢

And when I watched Joey build that turtle, I started thinking about what we're facing as founders, as professionals, as adults in the world: we have so many voices yelling in our ears. Society, bosses, business gurus, social media. It's pretty damn easy to lose sight of our own internal measure of what we want to build.

Are we building the sand turtle we want to build, what we believe needs to exist in the world? Or are we building the sand castle we think we “should” be building?

Joey was not building a sand turtle because someone told him to, he was building it because that's what his brain and heart needed to happen that day. That’s it.

Now, is it entirely possible to have a business idea in your brain and your heart that is not a viable business idea? Sure. But it is also entirely possible to build an entire business because you think it's what you “should” be doing, and that too will fail.

What’s something you stopped doing when you realized it was based on a should rather than what you actually wanted to build?