The 18th of last month was the five-year anniversary of the end of my company. Another way of looking at it: I’ve been not running the company half the length of time that I did run it.
I thought about, and then rejected, some sentimental post about it. The last five years have been like getting your arm stuck in an industrial wood chipper at 5:00 PM on a Friday, and you have to wait all weekend for a coworker to come and help you out of it. I just don’t have the mental space to dwell on it anymore. I’ve moved on.
Well, until last night when Facebook served up one of its memories, probably from one of its Hell-based data centers.
It’s a pic of my old Ford Ranger, loaded down with an entire two-bedroom apartment’s worth of stuff. This must have been from 2008 or 2009, just before I obtained my first fleet of grown-up moving trucks. It was from that early time where the side hustle was morphing into an actual business. This pic shows the day that thrust me from the side hustle mentality to “business owner” mentality. “We’re going to need a bigger truck.”
I did insane stuff like this routinely. It’s just what I had to do. At the time, I didn’t have a reliable system to estimate an apartment’s volume of “stuff,” so I just took customers’ vague word for it. “Oh, I dunno, it’s really not that much.”
Me: “Cool! Sounds like you’ll just need me and another guy. I’ll bring my little trailer just in case.”
More often than not, I’d end up driving past the Washington Memorial with a couch on my roof.
Also more often than not: I’d do this at least twice, sometimes three times per day. Seven days per week. For years.
It’s just what I had to do. My wife was at home with our first little boy. The second would arrive soon after. (I guess I made it home at least twice in those years…) It was grueling, dirty work. I was always one bad lift away from ending that week’s income. Legal perils abounded: we were moving the belongings of A-type, “morally nimble” Hill staffers who could (and often did) use any excuse to screw you out of hour agreed-upon hourly rate. Let’s just say I didn’t yet know about certain regulations governing the transportation of goods between states…
I didn’t see it then, but I do now: God was definitely riding shotgun.
I said I did it because I had to. That’s true. But I also did it because I came down with a terminal case of the Hustle.
Hustlepox?
This picture isn’t just a historical document: it’s a reminder of what it takes to build something; to build your own money-making machine.
I’m in another do-or-die moment. I’d like to think that this uncertainty, this wild roller coaster that doesn’t even have the oversight of a drunken carney, is just the natural state of an entrepreneurial man. Surely that’s what we tell ourselves, anyway. We are not ADD-addled slackers with a penchant for shiny objects. No, no, no, no—we are steely eyed pioneers who come alive in the wilds beyond the perimeter. Out here, chaos is the natural state of man.
Sounds better than “slacker moron,” anyway.
I was talking about these things with a buddy last night. He was asking me about next steps. He helpfully offered numerous suggestions, but it all came down to the same thing it always comes down to: action. People have been telling me for years that I know enough—I just need to take action on what I know. I couldn’t agree more.
This was driven in even deeper in a tweet (or an ‘X?’) from a copywriting ninja that I follow. He slew the #1 reason most people don’t act on their inspiration—they’re in an endless preparation loop.
There isn’t an entrepreneur, solopreneur, side-hustler, or wanna-be who wouldn’t agree with any of that. Here’s something I’ve finally realized, though: Underneath all of the education, preparation, planning, tasking, organizing, and other necessary and unnecessary bullshit is a very simple, seamless MacGuffin of Truth: 99% of it isn’t the actual work that moves the needle, and 99% of people never realize it. They’ve been doing all the right things, the needful things, but not the one thing they needed to do.
It’s almost a mystical change that comes over you when you can see, actually see the path through all the busywork. Any new endeavor, sensibly engaged, will by necessity generate an infinite number of sensible To Dos. I think that’s where most of these entrepreneurs and would-be business samurai get lost outside the wire: In the necessary non-essentials.
I harp on taking action a lot, I know. It’s mostly a reminder for myself. What might not be clear is what, if anything, I’m actually doing myself. Well, trust me, things are happening. I don’t want to talk about most of it because they’re still works in progress, and I know from long experience that the second an idea or an initiative leaves the safety of my mind and enters the public square, ownership is transferred to the Committee, and Committees are horrible dancers.
Suffice it to say that things are happening. I’m exhausted but encouraged. Right now my To Do list looks like my soul, which looks a lot like that little Ford Ranger heavily laden with other people’s stuff. No worries, though. We’re strapped down and heading to the destination. ;-)
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Truth. As the sneaker and sportswear company says…… well, you know what it says. I don’t want to be cited for violating trademark law. 😁