What has the burning desire I had at 16 got to do with business owners today? Watch this to find out!

Transcript:

Hi, and welcome to another episode of BaranovTV, designed to demystify the world of accounts and tax and to help your business grow.

Now, back in 1986, I was lucky enough to go to Canada with the school. I was part of the school band and I played clarinet. I was in the swing band as well, and we went off to Canada to Expo86, We did three concerts a day for, I think, it was two and a half weeks, something like that, in and around Vancouver and the World Fair.

Whilst I was away, the clarinet that I was using, which was a school instrument, was damaged. All of the instruments were piled into a van, they were piled in, pulled out, piled in, pulled out, and for some reason my clarinet got damaged.

So, when I got back to school at the end of the tour, which was the July, I went off on holiday, the long summer holidays, and I decided that I really wanted my own clarinet. I was adamant that I would work all the time I could. I worked in a dispensary in Dunstable over the summer, and I did all of the hours that they could give me over that summer because my burning desire over that summer was to buy this – my own clarinet.

It’s not an expensive model. It’s not the be-all and end-all, but it’s got a crystal mouthpiece on it, and it was my pride and joy when I bought it that September, ready to go back to school.

Today I wanted to talk about ‘burning desire‘ because as a business owner, it really does help you to focus if you work at what your burning desire really, truly is.

• It can be ‘legacy’ in that you want to leave something within your industry, or you want to make a real difference.
• Or just a legacy, say, just a legacy for your family, so you want to make sure that they’re secure and their needs are taken care of, potentially into the next generation.

A burning desire means that you’ll give up everything else for it. Back in 1986, that summer, I didn’t socialize, I didn’t buy clothes. I was really, quite really, really focused. I kind of disappeared! If I could work, I was working. I wasn’t earning good money, but I knew that I wanted to put every penny away to be able to buy my clarinet.

If your burning desire isn’t a burning desire, and it’s just something you’d quite like, you’re much more likely to be drawn off focus, so you’re less likely to make sacrifices that you should do, or that you would do, if it was a real true burning desire.

You can recognize a burning desire by what you’ll give up to get it.

So, are you prepared if something’s your burning desire, are you prepared to concentrate entirely on that one thing with a real single-minded focus?

Are you prepared to ignore what other people might think of you, or of your lifestyle if you decide that you are absolutely focused on one thing?

I didn’t care what my friends thought of me that summer. I knew I wanted my clarinet, and I wanted to be able to have that to go back to school in the September. So I knew what I needed to do in terms of hours to get to the amount of cash that I needed at the end of that summer holidays to be able to go out and buy this.

If you find your true burning desire, it will be uppermost in your mind, 24 hours, 7 days a week. It will become much easier to work out what you really need to do to get to that burning desire, and what the focus needs to be over time to make that happen.

So as we go towards the end of 2018, (I know we’ve got a few weeks left, but that’s going to disappear rapidly) we should be starting to think about next year now, and what we’re going to do in 2019, how we’re going to plan our time, and what our goals are going to be.

Whilst you’re starting to think about that, make sure that you’re actually looking at your burning desire, and you know exactly why you’re getting out of bed and going to work in the mornings. Because if you’re not sure about it, you’ve still got time to really give that some serious thought and working out what that is, that’s your real motivator into the new year.

I’m going to leave you with that thought. I’m going to go put my clarinet away, and I’ll see you all very soon.