Excerpt from Lori Harder advising founders/creatives to preserve their original vision amid external influences. She warns that mentors, competitors, and trends can subtly morph one’s brand into someone else’s dream, and encourages staying connected to the initial purpose to avoid losing one’s path.
As you get mentors and as you start looking at other companies, you're gonna start taking the vision that got you so excited, and it accidentally starts morphing into, like, well, oh, my God, Summer Fridays just launched this, or they did this, or their brand looks like this. And it's really easy to just become a version of their dream rather than your initial dream. It happens. That's natural. Things can kind of morph with what's out and what's trending and what's cool. But at the same time, you always somehow want to stay connected to your vision because you're gonna wonder why you lost your along this path multiple times. And it's going to be because you got too infiltrated by what either mentors said or what other people are doing, and that wasn't meant to be your path.
