Real talk for dreamers
I have a lot of conversations with people who want to do a big, risky, dreamy thing like start their own business or launch their career in the arts (which is also a business). Here is what I have to say:
Sure, go pursue your dream. Most businesses fail. Chances are, you will fail. Or you won’t fail but you won’t make it big. That’s not me being a downer, that’s literally just how the numbers work out. There is a ton of survivorship bias and overnight success bullshit out there. Starting your own business is not a reasonable thing to do. But who says that we ever were reasonable creatures?
In the beginning, you should not ask your dream to house and feed you. You will live off savings, loans, a day job, a supportive partner, credit card debt, and/or family wealth.
For businesses that do make it, it commonly takes five years to become profitable. This is a long fucking game. Pace yourself.
You have to become consistent in your work. You have to show up regularly. You have to do things even if you don’t want to. You don’t have to show up perfectly. You don’t have to become a robot. But you do have build trust with both yourself and your business. This is hard work if you shut down when you’re uncomfortable and only do things when you’re inspired.
Speaking of discomfort, you will have to network, market, and face rejection after rejection, failure after failure. These are totally learnable skills. 80% of the work here is managing your own experience with discomfort. Building a business means dying a million tiny deaths.
You have to understand that the world works through emergence. You have to repeatedly create input without knowing the output. An output may in several years, or never. This is the opposite of instant gratification, which is what our phones have trained us on.
Some bad productivity habits to drop:
working all the time
making something but never putting it out in the world
only working on the fun stuff in order to avoid all the cringey stuff
doing potentially high value work when you’re tired
one or the other: always being in your feels at the cost of doing work (maybe it's not that deep), or never thinking about your feelings in order to do work (feelings are normal, and serve as essential clues to the healing and growth we have to do)
If you want to work together on any of this, please reach out. About me: immigrant, Stanford grad, ex-Silicon Valley, and happy expat living in Berlin. I help underrepresented go-getters define and create their own success.
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