What A Hike In Vegas Reminded Me About Business Ownership
What are the perks of being used to the Central Time Zone while in the Pacific Time Zone?
5:15 am doesn’t exactly feel suuuper early.
Sean and I are in Vegas for his works Sales Celebration event and as mentioned above we’re up a bit early. While it’s true that Vegas never sleeps - you won’t necessarily find us at a slot machine at 5:00 am.
To get a break from the city we took an uber to Sunrise Mountain to try and catch the sunrise and take in more of mother nature than lights and flashing signs.
We pulled up to the base, picked our destination, and got started.
We started off on a nice flat-ish path with packed-down dirt. And as we kept walking it started to get a little steeper and the rock was a little looser.
A few moments later we made it to the spot where Sean had picked out. We took a seat and watched as the sun slowly lit up the town below us. Together we decided to keep going and I wanted to go to what looked like the edge of the mountain.
The higher we walked the steeper the side of the trail, so we were really watching where we were going (and this probably makes it sound like we were miles along, but it was like 1!).
We were making our way up and as I was thinking about it, Sean said “I keep paying so much attention to the path that I forget to look up and see the view.”
We took a pause and just stood there looking around. The massive casinos were in the distance to our left and then a massive mountain was to our right and also behind us.
Continuing on, what I thought was the edge was not at all the edge as it just kept going. Pausing again to readjust where we wanted to go next I pointed to another trail and Sean reminded me that we’d already walked along that one.
Determining that we were going to start heading down we picked out where we would exit the trail and we were good to go. Before we made the trek down, I saw another high spot I wanted to get a view from. He looked out over the city side and I sat towards the mountain and just closed my eyes.
For a few minutes, I didn’t really hear the road noise, the airplanes, or anything else. It was blissful.
Starting downhill was a little tricky because the rock was loose and some of the paths didn’t lead us where we thought, so we’d backtrack a little and head down another one. After a little over 2 miles, we found ourselves back on the pavement.
Because y’all know my brain tends to think in metaphors our hike made me think of business ownership:
Sometimes the path is smooth and simple and you can move along pretty quickly
Sometimes the path is a little rockier and you have to slow down
Remember to lift up your head and look around once in a while because you’ll miss the view of where you are and see where you’ve been and where you’ve gotten to
Pause
You may realize you’re going down the wrong path and it’s okay to stop, back up, and try again
Find people that will help guide you when you can’t necessarily see where to go because a different perspective brings a whole new view which can lead to new ideas or solutions
Sometimes the destination is not what you thought it was going to be
And keep an eye out for snakes :)
Hope this helps and if you're in vegas - I recommend taking some time to go hike around!