Crushing Grapes With Socks On
Life in a start-up is hard.
When I agreed to stay on in a sales office in 2003 for the woman opening business in a new location I was hesitant at best. And I wasn’t very good at it. In fact I quit less than a year later.
When I went back two years later (I wasn’t kidding, I really AM the poster child for Commitment-Phobia) it was to make a difference in an office. I had spent 18 too many months working for the corporate machine, and I needed to feel the freedom of 60-hour work weeks and thrill of losing sales and happiness of rejection.
Wait, what? Start-up life isn’t all sunshine and roses coming out your bottom? You mean you call them vomit moments because they aren’t always all that glamorous? But everyone writing about it online seems to tell these stories that lead you to believe you can just drop everything and whisk away to a new city or wake up one morning and decide to get out of bed on the LEFT side of the bed instead of the RIGHT and suddenly you are a multi-hundred dollar a month entrepreneur?!
The truth is start-up life and entrepreneurship is frickin’ hard! Someone once described it to me as drinking homemade wine, but finding out the crushers forgot to take their socks off. Sure, with certain dinners and chocolate cakes the taste is palpable if not kind of yummy (seriously, what ISN’T yummy with chocolate cake?) However there are other dishes you pair the sock-wine with that makes you want to spew Cabernet across the tablecloth.
You might have a great idea or be really good at a particular thing, but you know what? Skills are cheap, passion is priceless. Because when you are rolling pennies to buy ramen noodles, watching each hour slowly tick by on the evil little red light of your alarm clock because you can’t sleep trying to work out the PERFECT client transaction in your head, sitting in your office at 7:30 PM while all your friends are out at the monthly happy hour, it doesn’t matter how ept you are at something.
The people who succeed in these businesses, heck these lifestyles, have passion in everything they do. Passion is the only thing that gets you through it all, because you believe in what you are doing and are willing to sacrifice today for the life you want tomorrow. People like to think they can do that, but in reality very few will push through. Some have circumstances that lend themselves to few responsibilities and extreme risks. Others are planners/providers/obligated and have to move a little slower.
I’m in the latter category. I long to own my own business, to have the freedom and thrill and happiness of all the good and the bad of it all. But I can’t just ‘“do it” right now. I know myself, and it’s taken me awhile to get to the point where I did. I would seriously question every move I made if I did something that big without planning. People who depend on me would be left high and dry. Obligations (like those pesky loans that I hear you still have to pay even if you are trying to open your own business) will hang over my head.
But I work daily to improve my situation. To learn about start-ups and entrepreneurship. To hone my skills and craft. To build connections and networks and relationships. And above all to remind myself that I want this for myself passionately. So that when I’m up at 3AM eating ramen noodles wondering if my friends are up I’ll know that I made the right decision.
And that, my friends, is how I’m crushing it.
Photo Credit: Getty Images: John Slater
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