I Decided To Burn My Life To The Ground and You Should To: The Stopping of the Startup
It was almost one year ago today that I decided to burn my life to the ground. Radical yes, but I decided it was time to do something crazy because the only truly crazy option would have been keeping up the status quo. At least this way I would have the chance to rise from the ashes like a phoenix.
It was surprisingly easy to come to the decision, I felt that I had nothing left. When you have nothing it is easy to decide to give it up. There is only upside as it allows for the chance to gain something.
At this time I was in a relationship where neither of us were happy. We were both holding on to days long since passed. Lying next to someone who had once completed me was a constant reminder of what was missing.
I am known as the fixer, and historically I have always been able to fix everything. However, this time I couldn’t conceptualize a way back to “Our kind of perfect” as we called it.
After a series of some of the darkest hours, I came to the only conclusion that I could make sense of. Things were already bad between us and I knew what kind of toll the reboot of my professional life was going to take. Dragging the two of us through this wasn’t going to be fair.
One of the hardest things I’ve ever done was to close the book on this chapter of my life and began to write a new one. I say one of the hardest things because looking back on it, starting a new chapter might have been harder than closing the old one. How do you start a new chapter after you destroy everything you have known for the past 15 years all at the same time? Can you start?
My business was also going through very strenuous times. My team and I had been moving in different directions for a while. The stress and frustration of trying to lead us to the vision were approaching unbearable.
I was in the process of conceptualizing a transition that would set us on a path to success. Then my creative director decided to leave for another opportunity. Soon after my COO also jumped ship ahead of the course correction.
In the months leading up to this, I guess I knew deep down what I needed to do. I just didn’t know how to do it. I started my business when I was in the eighth grade, growing from nothing to something big and just like that it was headed back down to nothing.
They are right when they say the older you get the harder it seems to be to make drastic changes. At 34, I had invested over half my life into my business and it was going off the rails. At the same time, I was staring into the death of my longest and closest relationship. My world was coming to an end.
When I stop and think about it, I never have been one to give up. However, I also have always gone after anything I had a passion for. This is the moment where the two clashed in epic proportions.
At that time my business in no way resembled my vision. The vision in which I had once had such a powerful passion for. Although the thought of giving up was much like a dagger through the heart, living a lie and denying my passion was a much worse feeling. In the end, my drive to achieve my dreams won out. I knew I had to destroy my life as I knew it in order to clear the way for my dreams.
Don’t get me wrong this wasn’t easy. It was the loneliest year of my life. It was also the most mentally taxing year, pushing me into a depression that I had never experienced. It was professionally embarrassing. It was everything I never wanted to happen, but at the same time, it was everything I needed to happen to point me to where I was headed.
After 10 months of exhausting planning, the gears are now turning on my reboot. This time I am building the foundation from which an Empire can be built on. Writing processes and planning campaigns with all of the knowledge I gained from the failures.
I have always been the rock for the people around me and the past year was no exception. I was still a light of positivity talking about the values in failure. How I was grateful for the lessons and so on. Even when we know something to be true, it is still hard to maintain your mental status through all of those cold dark hours.
Oddly enough it was during this process that I felt alone and helpless first time. Even though I had been disabled for my whole life I had never experienced the feeling of helplessness. It wasn’t until I was without my team, with my company drifting away while I was powerless to save it that I felt lost.
This was one of those unanswered prayers that Garth Brooks is always singing about. I knew that everything was wrong. Deep down I hated my life. Why was I upset that I couldn’t save it? Who knows, we are just crazy sometimes I suppose.
A month or two after I started making radical changes I decided to really immerse myself into the content that Gary Vaynerchuk was pushing out. It’s not like I discovered something new, but it must have been something about the timing and where I was in life at that moment that made his content speak directly to me.
I was obsessed. I needed to know everything that he was putting out because it felt like it might be the answer to finding my passion again. It was.
It turns out that it was exactly what I needed. Over the next few months, there was a reoccurring theme that kept popping up in conversations. Everyone was inspired by my story and my drive to go on. One person even told me that because I have faced so many challenges in life with my disability that I was conditioned to be the ideal entrepreneur. I had developed the mindset that I was unstoppable and because of that, I was in fact unstoppable.
You see, everything looks different from the inside and from the outside. I was wallowing in shame that I had hung on myself when in all actuality I did have a few things to be proud of, I just didn’t notice them.
Don’t get me wrong, I know there was plenty of people talking about how big of a failure I was, but those people don’t matter. I’m not saying they don’t matter because they were being negative and this is my way of telling them to fuck off, I’m saying they don’t matter because they really don’t matter.
If they couldn’t see the positive in everything I had been through then they have never tried to create something brilliant. They lack the life experience to know what success actually entails. Success requires failure for the only way to find your way to success is by trying. Let’s be honest when we try anything for the first time we’re going to fuck it up somehow. It’s how we learn anything.
While I hunkered down and started planning I focused on the vision. I needed to get that feeling to the forefront of my mind. I don’t always need to know the path to take as long as I can see the destination. If I can see the destination in my mind I can navigate my way through hell to get there.
Over the next few months, I started to conceptualize what building a personal brand would mean for me and how it could help me inspire others. I longed to be the person who spoke a few inspiring words that happened to get someone else through their darkest hours. I looked at it as my way to give back or pay it forward. I couldn’t wait to start vlogging, but before anything, I needed to assemble my dream team.
The first breath of life that returned to me came after I interviewed my new creative intern. Krista was without a doubt the most intuned person that I had never met and described my vision too. After spending several years herding cats by trying to get creatives to follow my vision, this feeling was profoundly beautiful. It helped invigorate my passion and guide me in my new direction.
The next step was finding my number two, my Girl Friday. If I was to make the biggest comeback of all time I needed a rock star by my side. The beauty in failure is that you get a raw up-close view of everything that went wrong. This time I focused on my flaws to find who I really needed with me in order to succeed. After 36 applicants Hayley turned out to be a better fit than my wildest dreams.
For years I have said that I am the Tony Stark of T-shirts and all I needed was my Pepper Potts. I have finally filled that position and my new company is growing at a rapid pace because of it. I found an amazing partner, assistant, vlogging co-star, and best friend. I never would’ve seen this coming and because of that I never could have planned for it, but it happened. It happened because I allowed myself to throw out everything I knew in order to build the life of my dreams.
To everyone holding on for their lives
Are you holding on to something that you love? Or are you holding on to something because you don’t know how to create a life that you love? Look deep inside to find that answer. If it turns out that you don’t love your life and you can’t see it ever becoming fulfilling then please let go.
It will feel like you are falling deep into an abyss and that is a good thing. In the absence of everything is where you will find the substance of everything. I have always said that life is too short to make it anything less than amazing and I know it to be true now more than ever.
This is the beginning of my “origin story”. Follow along as I Hustle & Glide to the ramp of greatness.
I would love to be granted the opportunity to follow your origin story as you create the life of your dreams, whatever that is.
This story is published in The Startup, Medium’s largest entrepreneurship publication followed by + 375,985 people.
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