What to do when you have no fucking idea

I spend a large majority of my day wandering around lost.

Absolutely fucking lost.

I have a vision, and it looks and feels and sounds good and it even tastes good sometimes when I wash it down with copious amounts of alcohol.

(Which is rare, these days. In fact, depending on when you’ve read this, it’s been upwards of three weeks since my last one.)

But then everything beyond that, I’m lost.

I have mentors.

I have friends.

I have friends who are successful entrepreneurs.

I have the resources, the time and the energy to build whatever the fuck I want, if I so wanted to.

But then the rest of the day?

I’m fucking lost.

I’ll walk around in the afternoon, under the cold air of Denver and the hot sun and feel a certain listlessness, and then it’ll go away.

And then I’ll remember, there’s somebody who’s starting to send people to Mars or whatever and I’ll get depressed.

Then I’ll have a great call with somebody. Or connect with somebody who I’ve wanted to connect with for a while. Or send out a fucking invoice and get paid. And I’ll get excited.

Up and down, up and down.

One day, I want to be there, you know?

The point in which you’ve got it figured out, and things are rockin’ and rollin’. You feel confident in everything you do.

I have friends like that. Or, friends who I perceive to be like that.

Friends who have built companies that are more than lifestyles.

Actual businesses, you know?

But every time I compare my progress to theirs with a measuring stick, fucking lost.

Am I not focusing enough?

Am I focusing too much?

Is this a stupid idea?

Why, if it feels so important and right, does this feel fucking wrong?

And then I try to sleep. And nothing happens.

I wake up anxious and tired and scared.

Scared that I’ll have to make more big decisions in the coming weeks.

That I won’t have the courage or the mental wherewithal to deliver on my promises. To partners, sponsors, customers, friends, etc.

Exhausting wouldn’t even begin to describe it.

What I do to gain clarity when I’m feeling lost.

The truth is that I don’t have a great solution for what to do when I’m lost.

How often do you feel like you have no fucking idea what you’re doing?! a large chunk of them would say, ALWAYS. FUCKING ALWAYS. I WANT IT TO GO AWAY AND IT WON’T.

And so, it feels like most solutions, then, are temporary.

That feeling never goes away, it seems.

Or when it does, and things become comfortable then you settle down into a lull. And a total loss of creativity and things find a way to suck, anyway.

I take solace in journaling.

Like, not too long ago I ran into this mental total mind-fuck that was: I love my freedom, but I don’t like having too much freedom.

And I didn’t know how to solve that conundrum, or even what a potential solution might look like.

And it was frustrating.

So I went to coffeeshop and opened up my legal notepad because they’re inexpensive and then started journaling.

Usually, journaling is free-form but it almost always starts with a question. Like, what am I struggling with today? What’s fucking me up?

And then I go from there.

I write out my thoughts.

I usually don’t stop. Sometimes it’s five minutes. Other times two hours.

Here’s an example of what one end-result might look like:

(And here’s the Evernote link, if you so thoroughly want to check it out.)

It’s insane.

These musings are that of an insane person, but they work for me.

This journaling sesh, for example, led me to:

• Launch another mastermind group.
• Hire an accountability/sales coach.
• And commit to hitting a certain prospecting metric, every week.

That clarity lasted for a few hours.

Oh, and then I envision the worst-case scenario.

I have plenty of money coming in, but every time it goes down, down, down a small part of me has a complete and utter panic attack.

This is a common story, particularly among entrepreneurs.

You mention the phrase credit-lines and everyone nods their head.

The greatest fear of any entrepreneur is going out of business.

(Though the smartest entrepreneurs I know, they don’t risk a lot. They take baby-steps towards launching their companies. And then they don’t launch until it’s actually paying their bills.)

And so, I’m almost always faced with the challenge of asking myself, what’s the worst that can happen?

The problem with that, is that I’m an eternal optimist: none of them wind up looking that bad.

(For example, when I first moved out to Colorado, it took a few weeks to land a job and I knew nobody.)

Which means that I can take these fucking risks and I should.

Still, I’m faced with that nagging question of, is this a waste of my time? Will my business — will Startup Denver, or whatever it becomes — always be a hobby?

So I imagine these worst-case scenarios a lot:

• Trump becomes President and the economy tanks.
• One of my family-member’s dies.
• My business takes a shit and I can’t find a job.
• I’m forced to live on rice-and-beans for a while.
• I have to live on somebody’s couch because I can’t pay my rent.
• After living on a friend’s couch for a week or two, they’ve grown sick of me. And they’re tired of my overeating and over-drinking.
• I move back home.
• I become so depressed that I can’t get out of the house.
• I get fat.
• I get more depressed.
• I get even fatter.
• My skill-sets erode. I become a useless tool.
• etc.

I contemplate the worst.

I journal it all out. Again, sometimes it’s a few minutes.

Other times it’s a few hours.

But I have a little more clarity around what might happen when shit goes down.

An alternative.

Here’s Your Alternative, Lost in a Sea of Shit

Looking at the world through such different prisms helped me separate facts from perception. This ability would serve me incredibly well later when I became an entrepreneur and CEO. In particularly dire circumstances when the “facts” seemed to dictate a certain outcome, I learned to look for alternative narratives and explanations coming from radically different perspectives to inform my outlook. The simple existence of an alternate, plausible scenario is often all that’s needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce.

— Ben Horowitz, The Hard Thing About Hard Things

About once a week I have this dire, internal conflict that tells me that you should quit.

That I’m not smarter than anyone. I don’t work harder. I’m not more fearless or more talented, and that being an entrepreneur isn’t the best use of my time right now.

And then I call a few of my friends who are entrepreneurs, too (i.e. other white males from upper-class backgrounds) and ask, have you ever felt this way before? Lost in a sea of shit?

The answer is always an emphatic, yes.

And a slight sense of relief and calm washes over me.

Because there are always other options than doing the hard thing.

But they’re less fun, rewarding and full of bureaucratic bullshit.

I didn’t like them then, and I certainly won’t now.

I mean, I’d live, but I probably wouldn’t be very content not working for myself.

I asked a friend and a mentor of mine a few months ago what they did when they felt those inevitable lulls.

“I remember my first manager, at a sales job I worked at back in the day,” he said.

“And…?”

“And I never want to work for somebody like that fucking guy ever again.”

Originally published at All of Mike Kilcoyne’s Problems.