You Are Your Own Startup. Here’s What You Have to Invest to Keep It Running
Ever since I have had my own dreams and passions, I began to notice what others had of their own.
People dream. We can give them that.
In fact, it’s with that basic sense artists have a high sensitivity towards their art, and business men towards cutting lucrative deals, or coders towards coding their faces off. And perhaps (on hindsight), even cubicle-workers towards banging their heads on each wall of their infamous cubicles — mostly because of the whoosh of their passions waiting for them beyond the 9–5.
But more often than not, challenges can force anyone into believing otherwise.
Because the dream is irrational. A sheer waste of time. Nothing to build on. Nothing worth giving up your 9–5 where you mentally bully yourself between four walls. It’s what it always was in its most basic sense — a “dream”.
That’s what people will tell you. That’s what you will be made to believe.
But challenges don’t just play off what you think about your dream, or how confident you are about it. They don’t lay out platforms for you to skip your goals, or make you lose your motivating factor. As much as they can hurt you, they’re what will take you, as a dreamer, off the ground, into the air.
Because challenges give your dreams a “form”, and warrant them as “real”.
“Real” as in something real enough to cause real problems, requiring real solutions. That’s already a milestone.
That’s what pursuing a dream is all about.
It’s pretty much like a startup. You have to invest in something you don’t know will take off. There aren’t going to be a lot who will be ready to wager for you. It’s your game, your startup.
Except, you are your own “startup”.
It is your level of confidence that lays the foundation, creates your startup a profile, and helps culture what is most needed.
It is your patience that will help you see through the hard times, and help you painstakingly plan for all plausible follow-ups.
Your ability to absorb the good things from the environment will parallel having good partnerships, and that to spend less will help build you a peaceful framework to work in.
So what do you have to bring to the table to get it off the ground?
A runway? Sure.
Then make sure your runway is well invested in:
1. Invest your time.
Most people live with a 9–5 “mindset” — 9–5 job or not.
They work a time period that is externally required of them, but not what they require themselves of.
They jump into the reflection phase too soon — spending much of their evening time measuring how bad their day was. Or how demeaning, pathetic, irrelevant, and to what extent.
What they don’t try to understand is that they still have solid time available to catch up with what matters to them most.
This discrimination of time is mostly based on a mindset. Just like a 9–5 worker, we all carry similar time curbs that we feel obliged to follow. It is as if there just can’t be anything past six in the evening other than a steak dinner, or anything before six in morning other than an early breakfast.
This kind of mindset is limiting, to say the least. But it’s much more than that. It’s the dividends you don’t get to be paid off. It’s the absence of your ROI — because there was never an investment in the first place.
If you want to see yourself grow, you need to be able to harvest all the time that you can best make use of. It would feel like you are pushing beyond your stable limits. And rightfully so, it would be.
The only ploy that would work when it comes to seeing yourself succeed begins, at first, with a test to ensure you have what it takes — or that you will make sure you do.
Because Time is never going to wake you up, dress you, feed you, give you what you need, and wait as a silent spectator until you get things done.
2. Invest your wealth.
This is such a cliche, but not many people are willing to actually give away green papers. For them, money is what makes them their Plan B — one wherein they have enough to retrace their legion of steps back from their dreams, and build a different career altogether from the ground up.
But if you understand the importance of seeing yourself as someone who can one day amount to so much value, you will also understand Plan B — should there be one — is reinforcing Plan A.
This defines your going “all in”. The point is, if you are not going “all in”, you are not going at all.
Money, as an investment, can be used in numerous places. Other than that you need to directly structure your dream job, it can be used to strengthen your flanks.
It can be used to develop how you are as a person, which will directly reflect on how relatable your work is to another person like you. It can be used to educate yourself, gain yourself contacts that you can use, market yourself, or, to say the least, help you buy services that can help you get along with ease.
Although you cannot hope to “buy” a mentor, you can always buy mentorship. And mentorship can come from a lot of places — from online courses, managing to have lunch with someone you wish to emulate, to hiring a life coach, or finding an eminent podcast guest.
This is all to say your endpoint shouldn’t be when you are in a comfortable position with money flowing in just to cover your expenses. If you work towards money, you are actually settling for less — and probably for much lesser than what your passion is.
Sure, that can all happen someday — but not yet.
3. Invest your “Instant Gratifications”.
More than one point along your journey, you are going to be given something that would feel just right to settle for. But more often than not, if you did settle, you’d be settling for a temporary fling, rather than what you came all the way for — which could be a long-term relationship.
Any time of the day, you will have an easier alternative that you can rightfully settle for. But it’s when you don’t that you define yourself in a way many don’t.
Here are a few examples on what you have to choose:
- Creating over consuming.
- Walking over talking.
- The context of your craft over the pretext that you use for procrastinating.
- Working till burnout over working till clock out.
- Working out over hanging out (you get the gist).
4. Invest the lessons you learned from failures.
By definition, failures (or more likely, the mistakes that amounted to the failures) are bound to be characteristic of the doer. And the lessons learned thereby are certainly what will help all those who walked the walk a chance to do it again with perfection.
Just like Nicolas Cole says, “Never mistakes, always lessons.”
And the interesting thing is that it need not be your own failure. It could be anyone else’s. And it could be any lesson or experience that the doer might’ve learned going through it.
You can always read the success stories for motivation, to know how the “top” looks like, and to know what it feels like up there. But success stories will not educate you on your path. The scent of the champagne won’t, the Lambo won’t, the penthouse won’t, the reputation you have yet to seek won’t.
It’s always the failures that keep you equipped with the best perspective — the perspective of a “loser”.
But think twice about who’s going to know the path better — someone who went through it only once, or the one who went through it twice (and once through its hardest variant)?
5. Invest your energy (that doesn’t mean your health).
You are going to get burned-out like never before.
Your feet are going to get worn out. You have been in the hustle for too long, and just like any hustle, it will take a toll on you.
There is no other choice.
If you want to go a way that most people usually don’t dare go, you need to be able to work at least twice as much as they do. You can’t just expect to ensure your growth as someone you want to become without willingly working towards it.
If you want to shine like the sun, first burn like the sun. — Abdul Kalam
But this does not, in any way, mean you have to have a nervous breakdown to become successful. Once you begin sacrificing your sleep more than you need to, you will do yourself more harm than good. Your intelligent quotient decreases. You undermine your relationships. Your perception of reality changes, and you become as much capable to produce a two-hour result every eight hours that you grind.
