Starting a Business is Hard

Walking home last night, a very clear, succinct thought passed through my head, and I wonder if it’s passed through yours, too: Action is the best expression of intention.

It seems pretty obvious, right? But how much time do we all waste in protesting that we ‘didn’t mean to’ do or say the thing we did or said? How much effort do we put in to letting ourselves off the hook for the things we don’t do by promising ourselves we’ll do it tomorrow?

And how much does fear, or the feeling of being overwhelmed, or self-doubt (which I suspect are all different flavors of the same intoxicant) keep us from doing what we mean to do?

The best line Mr. Morton ever uttered I’ve quoted here before, “Act, or be acted upon.” He had another one, though, that I think was one of my brother’s favorites: “In not choosing, you have chosen.” Choosing to do nothing is still a choice.

The last couple of weeks I’ve been choosing to do a lot of nothing. That’s not a fair statement – I’ve been working and dealing with the admin hassles of setting up a new bank account and paying my taxes and so on.

But this is not the meaningful work. This is not the work I need to do to set up my business or do what I love to do. It’s just work for its own sake, for the sake of cash flow, for the sake of having something to do.

Not doing something, it turns out, is at least as stressful as doing something. Two weeks ago I was sitting in my apartment trying to get started. I knew exactly what I should be doing – there were things I needed to read, blog posts to work on, a business plan to revise, all sorts of stuff – but I couldn’t get started. I thought I would sit and meditate for 10 minutes, try to clear my head, and begin again. I sat, concentrated on my breathing… In: 1. Out: 2. In: 1. Out: 2. Over and over again, I counted.

The next thing I knew I was bowing forward, as if in prayer, in tears. Sitting properly for a few minutes hurt like hell. My shoulder and neck were in spasms of pain, I couldn’t stop thinking about the aching, couldn’t feel anything else.

I hadn’t done anything to injure my neck. All I’d done was let stress and fear and anxiety build up in my back and neck and then, when I thought I would take some new-agey route to focus, it reached up out of my back and neck and punched me in the face.

It goes back to the stories we tell ourselves about what we are capable of, what we deserve, what is possible. We experience a failure, perhaps. It happened. But we tell ourselves that it happens. Or worse, we see someone else do something and succeed – but we tell ourselves that we are not like that person, we don’t have the money, personality, contacts, whatever to make it work.

So we have to let things be what they are, and what they were, and what they are going to be. And we have to know the difference.

Let’s go back to the top: action is the best expression of intention. I’m not talking about grand gestures, big roll-outs, major launches. I’m talking about simple, small stuff. Little things that add up to something important and enormous. Small actions that speak volumes about who you are and what you do.

Aside: Huh. Maybe this is the part where I do relate to Don Draper in the season premiere of Mad Men. Why doesn’t the work speak for itself, then? I do all this stuff, why isn’t that enough? Here’s my slight cop-out of an answer: action is the best expression of intention but you must do that for yourself and for the enactment of reality. Narratives, storytelling, framing – that’s what you have to do to help everyone else understand. (And they’re not that interested in what you do, they want to know who you are. Yet another thing to work on. Oh well.)

The first challenge then was to seek actions that would get me out of my funk.

1. Get a massage to do something about my damn neck. If you live in NYC and want a recommendation, I have the place for you.
2. Call some friends. Make dates for dinner with people who believe in me, inspire me, respect me. Who want me to succeed.
3. Come to grips with the fact that ADD is a negotiable obstacle. Start negotiating. Does that mean meds? Maybe. Might that help with focus and task completion? Maybe. Is it worth a try? Hells yeah.
4. The tricks of magical thinking. My to-do list (while I await the teuxdeux app’s approval by the iTunes store!) was becoming, frankly, the opposite of useful. It was too long, not specific enough, didn’t have due dates. I was punishing myself with a list that was unachievable, not giving myself clear enough instructions, and defaulting to triage as the only tactic for getting through the day. My new to-do list is little pieces of paper in a ziploc bag. I jumble the scraps and then pull one out. I do that one. The trick is to make them clear and achievable. “Spend one hour researching competitors’ offerings.” “Sign up for three meetup groups.” “Write blog post about The Fantastic Four: Issue #2.” Then what to do first is out of my hands. I can pretend it’s fate, or God, or the fairies at the bottom of the garden.

Here is my to-do list:

Okay, those things done, I gave myself the leeway to simply say – this week has gone tits up. Who cares? Let it slide. I’ve been doing too much of that lately, though, so I had to put a deadline on it. Sunday, July 25 was a good date. The date of my dad’s birthday, three of my friends’ birthdays, the Mad Men premiere. And it was soon. Seemed auspicious enough. Plus it would mean that today would have to be different.

So on Thursday I had dinner with a friend – someone I wanted to work for early in my career, who I was blessed enough to work with in the middle of my career, and who is a dear friend and potential partner at this new phase of my career. We had a lovely meal, drank some delicious cocktails, caught up on stuff. And I had a moment of knowing what needed to be done.

1. I need to write the elevator pitch for the new company. What is it, what does it do, what doesn’t it do.
2. I need to build a rolodex – resources I can use to execute the work I want to do so I’m not playing catch-up when the first project starts.
3. I need to build the brand, which means I need to build my brand.

My friend agreed that these things were critical, gave me some useful things to think about, and said once I was ready, there were projects he wanted to do with me.

On Saturday, my other friend, someone I met when I first moved to NYC on Friendster(!) who works in the event planning industry as the editor of a trade magazine gave me some terrific ideas for number 3 on my list.

And this morning, just reading the Mashable app gave me some good ideas for number 2 on the list.

All that’s left is number 1 – which feels the most daunting, but is also the most exciting. Number 1 should be reframed as this simple question: Who do I want to be? The first step to answering that question is writing a short paragraph to post on a website. That’s it. One tiny step that will begin to unlock all the other little steps to the near future.

In the meantime I started this day by simply getting out of the house. I found a new cafe with wifi and coffee and bagels and decent music, and I’ve been here, reading and working on this post.

Which pretty much brings you up to date on where the hell I’ve been and what the hell I’ve been doing. Answers: Under a rock, being scared of the world.

Right then, that’s over (for now). On to the next thing.

So, the moral of this very long, very self-indulgent bit of bullshit is this: Get out of your own way. Do something.

Or, to quote the Levi’s campaign: Go forth.