I have a problem where whenever I do anything fun, and come back to my normal life, I find myself being a big hungover.
Not the alcohol hangover. Fun hangover. In fact, I’m not planning to drink anything until we’ve made our first sale (of whatever it is we end up doing). Until this business has an ounce of success, I’m making things a bit more uncomfortable by removing something that takes the edge off of a long day… so that I can use my evenings and other scraps of time to keep making progress. Embracing some discomfort for the sake of moving the ball down the field (I don’t play sports but for some reason love sports analogies and sports psychology, I’m not unpacking that right now).
But backing away from that tangent – fun hangovers…
Fun hangover is when you had such a great time that you can’t imagine needing to go back to real life. Like you basically just got a tiny glimpse of heaven, with good friends, great conversation, fulfilling activity, and much merriment, and now you’re cast back into the humdrum of daily living.
And I was camping and the literal pain in the neck kept me up.
So I’m a bit discouraged and unfocused.
But I am keeping this commitment to blogging every day, through the good and the bad, the ugly and the not as ugly.
On Friday evening, we came up with some basic cost analysis for online business ideas. We came up with 20 bad ideas. (Maybe not all bad, but hey). So what’s the next step? What’s the next thing we have to do that turns something into a real business?
I guess we have to figure out if there’s a market for any of these ideas.
But what about consulting again?
What I’m dreading and the nonsense I tell myself
And of course, I still have to compile that list of clients to contact, which I’m dreading, because I can’t imagine actually contacting 10 people (how annoying is it when you get unsolicited emails?).
I have stories in my head about a lot of things that are likely just excuses for why I’m not where I want to be in my life. “Well of course _they_ could succeed. Look at the ____ (dumb, silly, classless, irritating, etc etc) things that they’re willing to do to get there. I almost wish I was so ____ (ignorant, tasteless, idiotic, etc etc) so I wasn’t getting in my way. What a curse to be so ___ (smart, sophisticated, developed, etc etc)”
I’m not saying I walk around thinking this kind of thing all day, but only in my more resentful or jealous moments. I don’t know that it even quite rises to the level of a conscious thought. But don’t we all, from time to time, try to pretend that we have some moral virtue to explain our very real material failure or lack of some other moral virtue?
And of course, this is bullshit. I get to feel superior AND keep sitting around on the couch, letting time drift by without doing anything.
My real fear is probably that I do manage to find some clients, get them to pay me handsomely, and fail spectacularly, so badly that they curse me and spit at me as they drive me out of the building, and are so enraged by my incompetence that they take out billboards in every area of the country where anyone I’ve ever desired the respect of lives, just to say “That guy is literally the worst, and here’s the website with the details”.
But in all seriousness, can I deliver what I want to deliver?
Do I just play small with clients where I can’t make it worse? Where it’s easy to look great because their things are terrible?
And am I writing an extra long blog post today as a form of sophisticated procrastination? Time to stop that.
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