Chris Mance II - Mental Skills Coach

Entrepreneurship is hard. Everyone knows this. However, many people misinterpret the hard part. From the outside looking in it appears the hard part is quitting your job, building your product, and launching your business. Or said another way, just showing up. The reality is that showing up is the easy part.

Quitting your job isn’t hard at all. It’s actually pretty easy and it feels good too. I will admit that it’s slightly difficult to commit to an idea and build your product, but once you figure that out, launching the business is also relatively easy.

With that said, everything up to this point is the bright side of entrepreneurship. Quitting your job, building your product, and launching your business are all fun. It’s the stuff that makes a great book.

What doesn’t make a great book is the grunt work that comes next. The day-to-day grind of testing customer acquisition processes that don’t work. The day-to-day grind of waking up at 4 am and going to bed at midnight not knowing if you made any progress. The day-to-day grind of trying to make a dollar out of 15 cents.

I’ll be the first to admit that I got this wrong. 18 months ago when I drank the startup Kool-aid and quit my job, I thought showing up was the hard part. Now that reality has set in, it’s time to find out what real entrepreneurship is all about.

Today is the start of the most optimistic time of the year.  It’s the day that just about everybody agrees is a new beginning, a fresh start, a chance to go after your dreams.

In itself, there is nothing special about the 1st day of the year.  It’s a day when the sun comes up, then goes down just like the other 364 days in the year.

The only thing that’s different is this consensus among the masses that optimism rules the day.

This consensus on optimism is nothing short of amazing.  It creates so much momentum for everyone who buys into the cultural phenomenon of New Year’s resolutions.  When hundreds of millions of people agree that the time is now for self-improvement, you’d be a fool not to get on the band wagon.

Of course, you have the cynics (i.e. fools) who get joy by trashing the idea of having a New Year’s resolution. I say ignore these people and instead ride the wave of optimism as far as it will take you.

Sure you may start exercising, lose a few pounds and then gain it all back by this time next year.  So what.

It’s possible you may spend the month of January getting organized and by June have the same messy office.  Who cares.

Everybody has New Year’s resolutions they start and never finish. If it was easy, you wouldn’t have made it a resolution. Drive on.

What matters is that it feels good to get caught up in the optimistic wave that kicks off the year on January 1st.  All you can do is your best to stick with your plan to make this year better than last.

Let’s all toast with our glasses half-full to another chance at experiencing our best year ever.  Happy New Year!