The next lesson won’t be until next Wednesday, but I really feel this needs to be said and soon about the course.
You probably won’t follow through on this. Chances are good you’ll quit. Either you’ll decide that the insecurity is too much to take, you’ll look yourself in the face and realize that you need a boss to tell you what to do and when to do it, or you’ll get discouraged and disgusted and think I was “lucky” or am blowing smoke about this. I doubt that more than one in a couple of hundred have the requisite character traits and skills to make self-employment a genuinely viable option.
Thing is, it’s not necessarily about self-discipline. Certainly not in my case, as I’m hardly a self-disciplined person. It wasn’t self-discipline, it was desperation. I had a secure job with the best boss I’ve ever had, fantastic benefits and cool people to work with. And the idea of spending the rest of my life in an office, even in what was genuinely a great working environment, made me gag. I was willing to crash and burn hard if only I could say that I made a real, genuine, honest effort to be my own boss. If you’re desperate and there’s Just No Other Way to bring in money, you might very well succeed. “Root hog, or die!” has spelled the success of more than one entrepreneur! But, I wouldn’t risk a nickel that anyone reading this will actually do it.
This is not something you can do because you’re looking for the easy way to do something. If you are out of a job and you’re not combing the want ads for work, pounding the pavement and knocking on doors and willing to turn your hand to anything honest, if you turn down jobs that aren’t “good enough”, skip it. Stop reading. This isn’t going to do you a bit of good. You have to have a passion to work – either for the idea, or because you don’t want your kids to go hungry. If you’re thinking, “Oh it might be nice if…” or “I could pick up a little money doing…” you’re not coming from the place that will really work. You need all the focus of “I WANT” that you did when you were two. You have to be on fire to make this work. Though, sometimes that fire can be banked coals…
To give you an idea of what I mean, I’ll give you a little story.
My family goes to Virginia Beach every summer. We’ve been doing it since I was a small child. So, this was our week at the beach. I was sitting on the balcony about sunrise, with the bright orange disc beginning to push over the edge of the water, lighting a glistening golden path between myself and the horizon. It was a clear morning with a gentle, rhythmic surf, and weight of the damp, bone-soothing heat you get on Southern beaches in August. I had a cup of coffee at my elbow, laptop in my lap, writing an email to a client while my family slept behind the sliding glass door.
My father came out on the balcony with his laptop and a cup of coffee[1]. He opened up the machine, looked over at me, nodded to my computer and grinned, commenting, “That’s been a lifelong dream, hasn’t it?”
Yes, it was something I’d wanted and worked for from childhood. That’s passion.
[1] Yep, I’m second generation work from home. Part of my unsuitability for offices was probably a result of specific training!