"Why don't you just quit?"

The question in the title came from a brief conversation a friend of mine had recently with someone they bumped into in Galway. They were chatting about the usual stuff… “How are you getting on?”, “How are the business ventures going?” etc. etc. when out of the blue came that question, which knocked her sideways. 

She’s still not sure if it was meant from a kind, challenging, tough love kind of place or if it was exactly as it sounded… i.e. why are you kidding yourself with all these crazy ideas and unrealistic expectations… these daft dreams of world domination?

When she told me what he’d said, at first I got angry. Then I got to thinking… what is it that makes the self-employed, entrepreneurs, startup founders, eternal optimists and delusional dreamers like us refuse to qive up and give in? In other words… why don’t we just quit?

I based my final year college project on the Butterfly Effect which is part of Chaos Theory. It describes how a small change in one state of a deterministic nonlinear system can result in large differences in a later state. The simple example often used is that a butterfly flapping its wings in China can affect a hurricane in Texas. It takes a long time for the effects to be felt but they are indeed related.

Why do I mention this? Anybody with the desire and drive to do their own thing, to create, to build something or make the world a better place are looking to affect change and make a difference. No matter how small or large their actions are, they want to influence the long-term, whether it’s a corner shop owner looking to redefine standards for customer service in their local area or a startup founder looking to disrupt how students learn languages all over the world. Whether they ever know it or not, the change they create can be felt far and wide. They can even change lives.

I for one need a sense of chaos, of uncertainty, of stress around me in order to do what I do, in order to keep going and pursue my own startup projects. As Jim Loehr, a world-renowned performance psychologist puts it… “In a real sense, to grow in life, I must be a seeker of stress.” 

If we chose a different, more certain path, we could all live very comfortable, rewarding lives whilst actually getting paid what our skillsets and talents are worth. Instead, we’re often struggling to make ends meet whilst channeling what resources of time and money we have into chasing a dream, an idea, a revolution that may or may not come to fruition. It’s about creating a vision and believing not that it could happen, but it will happen. Often we have no choice but to believe. This blind faith in my own visions is part of what gets me through. Faith however, will only get you so far.

Every so often a soundbite, a quote or a line from a poem hits you so hard that it lodges itself in your brain and goes round and round on repeat until it becomes part of your belief system.

When Connacht Rugby coach Eric Elwood once told his players during a half-time team talk that they had to “Make it happen” in the second half of a game they were losing, something stuck. He told them that a second half comeback wouldn’t just happen because they wanted it to, they had to make it so. In the second half they put faith, belief and action together and pulled off an unlikely win. 

Those words are a constant reminder to me that nothing comes easy. Entrepreneurs / founders / self-employed dreamers have to take our ideas, our visions, our beliefs and back them up with action and dogged persistence or they will forever remain scribbles in a notebook, an un-launched website or a business plan that will never see the light of day. I should know, I have lots of each.

It takes a special, crazy breed to put everything on the line to chase a dream and a vision that nobody else can fully understand and appreciate. It’s about making a difference and doing it on your own terms. It’s what drives you to work 15-hour days and make massive sacrifices. It’s the road less travelled with seemingly endless roadblocks and reasons to turn back.

So why don't we just quit? Because we’re not wired that way and we will 'make it happen'.

Mr. Awareness

Awareness is the ability to directly know and perceive, to feel, or to be cognisent of events. More broadly, it is the state of being conscious of something. So says Wikipedia anyhow. 

You see awareness is something that's been bugging me for a while now, or people's lack thereof. It can be something as simple as someone not holding the door on the way out for a person coming in or someone going too far in a conversation or social situation because they are too wrapped up in themselves that they don't realise they're creating an uncomfortable situation. 

Maybe I'm hyper aware of my surroundings but I genuinely think it wouldn't hurt to think about others a little. I'd been thinking about how to structure some thoughts on awareness for a good while and couldn't really figure out what to do. A blog post maybe? An essay? Wasn't sure. Then it hit me one day in a coffee shop when I bumped into a guy I call Mr. Awareness. He might have pissed me off just a little! 

Mr. Awareness

All I wanted was a coffee, 

All I needed was you, 

To open your two eyes, 

And realise there was a queue. 

I bet you’ve never held a door, 

Or gave your seat up on the Dart, 

Sure it’s way too late to change, 

Sure you’re way too old to start. 

I bet you’re the one in traffic, 

That never lets anyone out, 

I bet you’re always found wanting,

In a bar when it’s your shout. 

I still got my coffee before you, 

I still got the last seat in the place, 

Captain Oblivious has left the building, 

His awareness missing without a trace.

The ball of wool.

I tend to use this blogging thing as a way of checking in with myself every so often and almost venting things that are on my mind out onto a page. I don't write for an audience but if someone reads a post and can connect with it in some way then great. 

Writing, for me, is quite a therapeutic process which allows me to untangle the spaghetti junction of thoughts that can reside in my heads.

I'm a very visual person and sometimes visualising a concept or a problem is the only way I'll properly understand or solve it. It took me a long time to figure out a way to visualise what's going on in my head most of the time but I settled on a big tangled up ball of different coloured threads of wool. Each thread represents a train of thought, a problem, a job I need to do. My brain isn't the most organised of places hence why they're all tangled up. My challenge is to pick a single thread and focus on untangling it until it's free from the big, jumbled up ball of other colours. Mentally laying this thread out straight on a table means that I've resolved an issue, completed a task or figured something out to the point that I can move on to the untangling of the next thread.

Developing a concept like this and beginning to understand how your brain works is great but it's only half the battle. The consistent application of a concept like this is where the benefits lie but I'm still struggling massively with this consistency. I'm still finding it hard not to be distracted by the other coloured threads at times and focussing on one thing without being tempted to move on to another has proven quite difficult.

Unless you keep tabs on the amount of threads in your ball of wool (or whatever interpretation or visualisation that best suits you), the chances are that the number of problems, worries or things you have to do will simply multiply and multiply to the point that you won't even know which thread to start with. This can be paralysing. I know only too well how this feeling can stop you in your tracks, generate massive quantities of self doubt and leave you feeling almost powerless to change your situation. I reached a pretty low point a number of weeks ago when I couldn't even focus on the ball of wool. I didn't know where to start, what thread to tackle first, I was paralysed by fear. What did I do? I ordered a pint in one of my favourite pubs, sat down and started typing until I'd made some sense of why I felt the way I did. It was therapy of sorts.

What I did decide that day was that this was the lowest I was gonna allow myself get. I decided that this was a turning point and as clichéd as this sounds, I decided that I was gonna take a shit situation and turn it into an opportunity.

The next few weeks were consumed by a lot of reflection, trying to decide if I was indeed doing the right things, if I was on the right path and if I'm doing the things I want to and should be doing. It took a book called 'Grit - The Power of Passion and Perseverence' (Thanks Mo!) and a late-night cup of coffee to figure out that indeed I was on the right path. I'd always been aware of the idea of having a high-level concept for a business, a mission statement or a manifesto. I was less aware of the importance of having one for yourself.

A manifesto helps you define what you want your overall purpose to be, towards which all of your actions and decisions should lead. It's probably best to define one for work and one for your personal life although many aspects will probably overlap. So it was with the back of an envelope and a Starbucks coffee that I defined my high-level concept, my manifesto, my reason for doing what I'm doing. And it made perfect sense. It's been there in my life all along but I never quite realised it.

It's now my job to make sure all my decisions point in that particular direction and finally I understand the true motivations behind unraveling all these threads.

I'm not going to share my manifesto with people either. Instead, I'm going to show them.

Let's talk about our freight trains.

Today I read about the mental health struggles of 2 people who, on the surface, appear to be two of the strongest, most accomplished people on the planet. One is an internationally renowned singer/songwriter/rock and roll legend who plays to packed out stadiums for almost 3 and a half hours at a time. The other has won every major honour that any footballer could ever dream of and is consistently lauded as one of the best midfielders of all time. I remember his debut and in a 20 minute cameo, he ran the show.

Bruce Springsteen and Andrés Iniesta might be known all over the world, have more money than God and may be lavished with praise on a daily basis but they’re just like everyone else, they’re vunerable. Whether it’s clinical depression in the case of The Boss or something triggered by the loss of a friend in the case of Barcelona’s captain, it needs to be addressed. Springsteen’s wife Patti described it as a freight train quickly running out of track that needed stopping but too many people, men especially, are still brushing off issues with their mental health as signs of weakness and eventually running out of track.

I did exactly that for years and I eventually realised how foolish and naive I was to think that I could brush things under the carpet and completely ignore the times I felt a little under the weather in the head department.

Only the other week I had a difficult couple of days that were the culmination of a load of different stresses, pressures and events that eventually got the better of me. The only thing I could do is take myself out of the situation I was in and do what I wouldn’t have done if it had happened a few years ago. I turned to people for help. I spoke to some of the most important people in my life and I talked it out. I was able to see what might have triggered various feelings and being able to understand and rationalise it was comforting in itself.

In the grand scheme of things my issues weren’t all that great and I realised that. It’s important to put everything into context but it’s equally important to be comfortable with the fact that whatever happens, however you’re feeling, is a massive deal in YOUR world.

Nobody is immune to feeling a bit shit. Nobody is immune to struggling from time to time. Nobody should be afraid of asking for help. It’s amazing how helpful and understanding friends and family can be, mainly because they probably went through something similar themselves. You also feel a tonne lighter once you say it out loud.

As a society we’re getting better at talking and asking for help but we still have a long way to go, especially men. The world of mental health is littered with clichés but it’s genuinely good to talk, it really is. If you’re feeling shit then get in touch with a friend, meet in person if you can, go for a coffee and talk about it. In my experience they’re more supportive and understanding than you ever gave them credit for.

Just don’t forget to ask how THEY are. 

The Price of Progress

There are a thousand books, blog posts and YouTube videos that tell you to visualise your goal, to picture it there right in front of you. Be it lots of money, a sexy red sports car or the man/woman of your dreams, they encourage you to picture it and keep that vision with you at all times whilst pursuing your goal. That theory is a wonderful one but in practice it's hard to keep that level of focus when the pursuit of your dream leaves you struggling to put food on the table or late in paying your rent. It's a terrible feeling and one that takes over a part of your thoughts that you should be using to focus on your goal, your dream, your passion. One eye is on progress whilst the other is wasted focusing on just getting by.

There are lots of people out there with personal dreams or entrepreneurial ambitions for which this feeling is too much. They do what may well be the smart thing and get a nice job with a good salary but most importantly they're giving themselves something else, stability. I get this and God knows I wonder sometimes if I should follow them down that same stable job, guaranteed income, normal hours, paid holidays type route. It's really tempting and I'd be a liar if I said I haven't spent hours looking through the jobs listings and pondering the pros and cons of applying for one of them.

It usually only takes me a short while to realise that no, I shouldn't. It's taken me a long time to realise that I'm not built like that. It's taken me even longer to understand that it's ok. I've grown up surrounded by business, albeit not your typical one. I've had the best possible mentor, my Dad, who has thought me there is only one way to do things... the right way. It sounds like a cliché but if you don't set your standards (and goals) high then you're not giving yourself the best chance to succeed.

This year I've spent time putting actions to some ideas that I've been told are ridiculous notions and can't be done. Negative responses like that spur me on and inject a stubborn insistence into each project along with an unshakeable belief that there is nothing that can't be done.

I guess what I'm trying to say is there will be countless times when you doubt yourself (as I do), your ideas, your ability to make shit happen. There are days that you'll feel like a fraud (as I do)... "Who am I to think I can change the world just a little bit?". The truth is you're changing the world simply by trying. You've left the shelter of the safe harbour and the ripples you create can turn into waves of change.

If you can look beyond your bank balance, the food you don't have in the fridge right now, the rent you're days or weeks overdue, the critics and the self doubt, then you're halfway there. If you can still visualise your goal, right there in front of you despite all of that and give it all you have then the success will come... as will the money or anything else you want.

Just remember... doubt is temporary, change is permanent.

Make it happen.

Right time. Right place.

Being self-employed sucks… but only sometimes. This coming from someone who’s typing this from a park bench while the world around him is going mad on the crazy commute homewards. I’m not sure working for yourself is a job. It’s more like a vocation. It kinda needs to be to put yourself through the relentless ups and downs that come as part of the territory.

I’m sure someone out there has said this but “The only certain thing about self-employment is uncertainty.” What I’ve found is that people like myself seem to thrive on that kind of thing. I’m not sure why but there’s a sort of organised chaos that becomes part of your everyday existence and life without it somehow doesn’t feel the same.

I’ve always said I’d make an useless employee. I really believe that. I’ve never been a big fan of being told what to do and even less of a fan of someone telling me how much I’m worth. Now don’t get me wrong, there are times that I’m incredibly jealous of people who get a good wage week on week, month on month. I understand how the security that comes with can be incredibly desirable and there have been many times when I’ve thought about packing it all in and getting a ‘real job’.

I’ve had a couple of different companies that were successful in their own right but I could never shake the feeling that there was something else out there that had a hold of me and wouldn’t let go.

It took years and years to get to where I am at the moment but for the first time in a very long time it feels like exactly where I want to be, right here, right now. All my experiences, successes and failures are coming together to inform what I’m now doing. It hasn’t been easy but I’m more comfortable and aware of who I am, what I’m good at and where I want to go.

There are lots and lots of people like me trying to take a seed of an idea in their head and make it into a sustainable reality. It takes guts to do it that. Maybe it was easier for me because I’ve never known any different. I was once told at an interview that I was mad for wanting a ‘real job’ because I was already self employed and ‘living the dream’! My bank balance would have told a different story!

It’s not easy but nobody ever said it was. It’s a cliché but if it was easy then everyone would be doing it. It takes guts, passion, a certain amount of naivety, a tonne of risk and no little heart to take an idea and create something incredible and I have infinite admiration for those who do.

If you have an idea that you can’t shake, one that’s still in your head morning after morning, go for it. At the very least do some research and weigh up all the pros and cons cos this momentary thought, this spark of genius, could very well be the beginning of the rest of your life. And always remember, no-one else is gonna do it so… make it happen.