I’ve been following Sarah J. Bray since January 2010. Yes, I know the exact month because finding Sarah marked a huge shift in my business.

For me, Sarah represents the pinnacle of both digital honesty and unflinching ambition. It’s a beautiful combination and really points to the promise of the You Economy. If you can be both truly yourself and full of the passion required to make big, big things happen, how could you call yourself anything but a success?

I spoke with Sarah about her two latest projects, A Small Nation and Tour de Bliss. Both represent the elegant, iterative process that Sarah uses to generate work that is meaningful to her team and transformative for her clients.

Her ever-evolving process of finding work that meets that criteria is something I really wanted to dive into. Her advice was to “treat it like an experiment” and to not pretend that this is going to be what you’re doing for the rest of your life.

We often get so wrapped up in getting things perfect that we forget that learning is our chief job as entrepreneurs. Perfection teaches us nothing. Striving for permanence is foolhardy. Embrace a legacy of authentic, purposeful experimentation.

We want to find out bliss, our ideal life, but we always want to reach for greatness. The thing is we’re never quite sure about what either of those things are. Our ideal life & our great work, they are unknowable. We have to purposefully experiment to come closer & closer to knowing.

What’s truly beautiful about Sarah’s process is that its goal is always moving towards her ideal instead of moving away from what is unappealing. Move toward what compels you, not away from what repels you.

Find Sarah at A Small Nation, Tour De Bliss, and her own site. Follow her on Twitter.