Discovering your purpose is the first step to entrepreneurial success. In a recent blog I gave you a guide to discovering your purpose and as you may have found it’s not easy. In fact, few of us discover it until our late 30s or 40s.

But when you have discovered your purpose (your ‘why’ according to Simon Sinek) then ‘how’ you will accomplish it becomes a whole lot easier to figure out and often results in a change of direction.

Stephen Covey described it like this: you get to the top of the ladder and find that it’s leaning against the wrong wall.

That’s what happened to me; I’d become a partner in a big-4 accounting firm in my mid-30s but increasingly the work I was doing had little meaning. I was meant to be elsewhere.

My journey towards finding my purpose took several years and at first the path was far from clear. There wasn’t much written about purpose back then. Eventually I found ‘Built to Last’ by Collins and Porras, which was instrumental if fueling my journey and the path started to become clearer.

But I experienced a dawning realisation that if I was to complete my journey I’d have to do so alone. None of my colleagues shared my purpose, nor did they share the vision I was starting to develop of ‘how’ to achieve it.

Since then I’ve been fortunate in being able to help other people meet the challenge of ‘going alone’. I now have a business that does just that for people who want the flexibility of working from home. I have a great business partner with whom I share a vision of helping people start their own businesses as we did.

When your ‘why’ is strong enough, the ‘how’ will take care of itself. It isn’t easy – nothing worthwhile is – and there will be setbacks. But it will never be dull.