“There’s a difference between achieving your goals and realising your work matters.” Seth Godin

Yesterday was a good day! You logged on first thing and found you’d sold a dozen eBooks overnight. You had five email queries about your latest online program and ten enrollments…..not bad. Your blog post got eighty retweets and your designer came back with some great concepts for your new logo.

Today though didn’t start out too well. That email from X Corp before breakfast cancelling your talk didn’t help.

Every single one of us is in love with our own idea. Yes solo entrepreneur, creative genius, blogging king, Mr Startup CEO, lifecoach, guru, Etsy queen, empire builder, rock star designer and social changer, I’m talking about you too.

What you do is important and it does matter. You just don’t need to get on ‘the idea validation roller coaster’ to prove it.

Of course you need to get feedback about what’s working and what’s not and make sales to pay the rent but you don’t have to give away control to the external locus that is your inbox.

Anything worth doing will mimic a roller coaster at times with it’s hills and dips, highs and lows. Those highs and lows though relate to the ‘what’ and not to the ‘why’ of your idea. The ‘why’ is what keeps your grounded and sane.

I read an article by Noah Kagan founder of App Sumo today. In it Noah talked about micro burnout that feeling of deflation and demotivation that starts when your inbox doesn’t send you the right signals.

Yes it’s fantastic when things fall into place. When your income goes up by 20% on last month, when your non-profit gets that additional funding and you’re invited to do a high profile guest post.

But on the days when it’s not going so well remember that you don’t need the permission of anyone to be awesome.

Image by Raphael Goetter.