Brand Ethos: A Living Text
*adopted from A Better Lemonade Stand
START SOMETHING
We can adjust our path or change path altogether as our situation and journey dictates, but above all else, we must start. We won't get caught up waiting for the perfect moment, stalling for the most ideal circumstances or postponing until we have more time, energy or money. Those excuses will do nothing for us except waste more of our precious time. We will use what we have wherever we are and start something.
KEEP MOVING FORWARD
The secret to success is progress. If we can make progress on a consistent basis we’ll constantly be moving toward success. We won't let ourselves fall idle or become complacent, losing momentum will only hinder us. Even if we’re only taking the smallest of steps, or feeling like we’re taking three steps forward and one step back, that’s still progress and we’ll still be moving forward. Keep up the momentum.
WORK HARD
Miscalculations, bad decisions, smarter competitors and market shifts are all acceptable ways to fail on our journey. We never want to fail because we didn’t work hard enough. Even if we don’t have as much time or energy as we’d like to dedicate to various pursuits, we'll work hard and smarter with the time we do have.
FAIL FORWARD
Every failure is a step forward. Every time we fail we have the opportunity to learn something from it and ease the anxiety when we do it again. That’s progress in every sense of the word. We won’t let the fear of failure hold us back from trying. Every successful individual or company in the world failed along the way, so we wouldn't be the first and we won’t be the last. Chalk it up to a learning experience and try again more intelligently the next time. That’s how we fail forward.
TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
We must take responsibility for our choices, attitude, actions, and reactions. It’s one thing we’ll always have control over. Realize that we cannot control others and that their opinions and actions toward us have nothing to do with us. Focus on our own goals, own up when we make a mistake, stay in our own lane and be the one in control of your own journey.
FIGURE IT OUT
Every day we’ll face new challenges, closed doors, limiting barriers and seemingly insurmountable odds. We'll figure it out. No one knows the answer to everything and oftentimes businesses are faced with so many different obstacles they don’t know the right answer to. Many of these obstacles won’t come with a clear solution, so it’s going to be up to us to do our own due diligence, weigh the pros and cons, conduct our own research or just do some trial and error. We’ve got to be willing to take the plunge and figure things out if we want to achieve our goals.
MAKE THE DIFFICULT CHOICES
The easy choices, much like the easy paths, rarely lead to interesting journeys or to the right destinations. Make the difficult choices and make them often. It’s not going to be a pretty, smooth or seamless journey, there’s going to be painful moments, sleepless nights, tough decisions and we might not know if we’re making the right choice at the time. The point is to make the choices we have to make when we have to make them, though, or we’ll be hindering our own progress. It may not be easy but that’s what makes it worth it.
Conclusion
I hope this manifesto will keep us inspired to stick it out through the tough times in our journey, and I hope it leads us to make progress towards our goals. So much of success comes from possessing and executing these traits rather than having a specific skillset or a network of people that surround us. So many businesses have achieved their goals by having the mindsets reflected in this manifesto and we are no exception. Start something, keep moving forward, work hard, fail forward, take responsibility, figure it out, make the difficult choices and we’ll be on our way to making the best decisions for our business and challenging ourselves to improve every day.