In high school I started a band and our first show was downtown. Tickets were $6 each.
When I started selling them I anticipated some no’s. People are busy and I get that.
Then I got lots of no’s. Friends said $6 was expensive and that Atlanta was too far away, despite their allowance being 5x mine and their frequent weekends in the city.
This was my first exposure to people not believing in me.
Then I graduated high school in May 2008. While my friends flew to college that Fall, I drove to North Carolina and spent my life savings recording a solo album.
My website was all like,
“Do you want to pre-order it?”
Sure.
“Here’s a link.”
–radio silence–
My third experience was Nov 2012, when I wrote a book and launched a Kickstarter project to fund the publication.
Things were different now, I thought, because everyone grew up and had jobs and disposable income.
Emails to friends were all like,
“Do you want to pre-order it?”
Sure.
“Here’s a link…”
You can guess what happened next.
When you do entrepreneurial stuff, you’ll probably need funding. Art projects, product launches, mission trips, whatever. All cars need gasoline before they run.
Counterintuitively, you won’t learn if all those people rooting for you actually believe in what you’re doing until after you ship. This is because it’s free to support ideas but a burden to support execution.
I said before that entrepreneurship is the ultimate heartbreaker.
Not software, design, or operations.
Those are functions, while entrepreneurship is the aggregation of resources (belief) and the transformation of those resources into an area of higher yield (profits, attention, social good, etc).
So something entrepreneurs experience that other people don’t is the incessant pulse of how much (or little) people believe in them.
And that begs a critical ingredient of entrepreneurship– you have to be you biggest fan. But you also have to be your biggest critic.
Because to be good at your craft requires experience. And failure begets experience 10x more than a pat on the back.
So you have to fail all the time, believe in yourself anyway, ship stuff that everybody might hate, and then improve.
That’s entrepreneurship.
Welcome.