When you’re an entrepreneur, you’re driven by passion. Creating a successful business is about more than having a great product or service idea. It’s about pouring your energy and time into accomplishing a big, audacious goal. In the process, your dream is going to regularly collide with the realities of life.

After all, we have to support ourselves. We have mortgages to pay, bills to take care of and groceries to buy. The challenge then becomes aligning those short-term needs with your long-term goals, allowing you to accomplish everything you’re looking to achieve.

In many cases, this means taking the path of least resistance. What this means will be different for every entrepreneur and situation, but the general idea is to maintain a balance between your immediate situation and your end goal. This often means taking smaller steps over a longer term, rather than risking everything on a make-or-break gambit.

For instance, in my recent discussion with author and burgeoning entrepreneur Pam, we discussed the strategies of finding a publisher for the book she’s written about sexual abuse. Did it make more sense for her to approach a publisher through the traditional channels of book proposals, or would it be a better idea to build up an audience first?

Investing all of her time in getting the attention of a publisher, struggling to be seen over other writers, is a high-risk, high-reward gambit. It’s a process much like finding an investor. Even if the publisher liked her book, they’re still holding all the cards. They could turn her down, offer her a bad deal, or insist on changes to her book — her product — before agreeing to publish it. Her challenge then becomes a matter of finding the right publisher, which could easily become an exhausting process.

At the same time, Pam has the option of building her audience first. She could share her work on her website or blog, having total control over her message. She could write new articles and columns for other websites and publications, growing her name recognition — her brand — and build connections through public presentations and social media networking. She could even skip the mainstream publishing route, and self-publish through ebooks. Once she’s established herself, she might even find publishers approaching her directly. That’s a much lower risk approach, but it also a longer, slower path.

If we zoom out a little, it’s easy to see how this fundamental choice of high versus low risk can play out. While Pam’s situation is mostly about investing time and energy, for most entrepreneurs it’s even more complex. After all, starting a business is expensive.

Does it make more sense to take out a huge loan to rent a location and invest in inventory, all in the hopes of beating competitors to market? Or is it wiser to take a slower, more cautious approach? And how will each of those approaches impact your daily life, and your ability to maintain your current lifestyle?

There isn’t a single, one-size-fits-all answer, but these are important questions to ask as you develop your business. The more aligned your long-term goals are with your short-term needs, the less stressful and more rewarding the process tends to be.