T-Minus 7 Days to Believing
Whenever I am getting ready to launch a new project, my nights become endless periods of darkness where my biggest fears tell me I shouldn’t do it. I’m worthless. How could I think this would succeed?
That’s the hardest part of being an entrepreneur, believing in yourself and your new idea. And now that I am less than a week from launching, my anxiety is greater than ever.
Belief
be·lieve: /bəˈlēv/ verb accept (something) as true; feel sure of the truth of.
The word “believe” always takes me back to Peter Pan, and how when I was young, I believed with my whole heart that I could fly. I only needed to find a little fairy dust and believe.
In fact, my belief that I could actually fly was so strong that all I was missing was the fairy dust, which is about the only thing which kept me from leaping off the roof of my childhood home.
At night I would be flying in my dreams, doing breaststroke in the air. I could feel the position my body needed to be in to soar upwards (arch the chest up) and then dip your head to go down, and I have seen that childhood home from a bird’s eye view more times than I can count. As an adult, my nighttime dreams still have me flying high above looking down on that same home and yard where I so often played.
Isn’t it strange, though, that as we age, the strength of our ability to believe doesn’t grow with us. As reason and logic develop in our adult brains, belief becomes outnumbered, overshadowed, afraid.
Doubt > Belief
Perhaps the worst thing about adults is we are much more willing to doubt rather than believe. We have been so trained and conditioned to look out for the dangers in the big bad world that we are often on the defensive, even toward ourselves.
Don’t ride your bike over that ramp, you might get hurt. Don’t climb so high in that tree. Be careful swimming so soon after eating. Your socks don’t match. Don’t talk to strangers. Watch out for cars. Lower your voice.
And while a few of us may not have survived to adulthood without these firm parenting rules, somewhere along the path of growing up, we abandoned our beliefs in favor of more common sense ideas.
I cannot fly. Because of gravity.
I will not find fairy dust. Because fairies are not real.
How. Depressing.
Adulting is Hard, Y’all
I heard a story on NPR this morning about a group in New York offering “Adulting School” for twenty-somethings that don’t know how to fold laundry.
I’ve always been of the opinion that folding laundry is not a necessary life skill (wrinkles are fine), but I actually understand the concept of the school because adulting is hard, y’all, even for those of us who have been at it for a few decades now.
Paying the mortgage, cleaning the house, balancing work with doing the dishes. Life sets all kinds of rules that we adults must follow.
But it doesn’t mean that being an adult should rob us of believing. The two are not mutually exclusive.
How else do you explain the most marvelous things that coming about from the most crazy ideas?
Thomas Edison so fiercely believed he could create a better light bulb that he tested more than 6,000 possible materials, ranging from cotton to bamboo.
Bicycle makers Orville and Wilber Wright so believed they could fly that they created a plane that could do figure eights within two years of Kitty Hawk.
The builders of the Brooklyn Bridge so believed it was structurally sound they paraded P.T. Barnum’s elephants across the bridge to prove it.
Walt Disney so believed in art and drawing that as an ambulance driver for the Red Cross during World War I, he covered his ambulance not in camouflage but in cartoons.
Release the Belief
So how do we get our adult selves, the ones who are uber responsible and worry about paying the bills on time, to ease up a bit and let belief out?
I would venture a guess that those of us who can stifle the common sense, this-may-not-work attitude are the same ones who end up as entrepreneurs. Those cut from the same cloth, who brave going without a safety net. Those individuals who aren’t afraid to put themselves out there in spite of the possibility of embarrassment or failure.
I am one of those people.
Now I am not saying that I’ll try jumping off the roof anytime soon, as I still know I cannot fly. But if I let a little belief into my life, maybe… just maybe I’ll start believing that my next project isn’t such a dumb idea after all.
Maybe it will even work!
I’ll be launching my new project within a few days’ time, so I hope you’ll follow my journey. I’ve got some valuable information to share with you, things that have taken me years to learn. (And it doesn’t include how to fold clothes. There’s an Adulting School somewhere for that.)
