Bull Sh*t: Fake It ’Til You Make It

Yes, sometimes in life things won’t go perfectly. You will encounter time periods where you’re stressed, exhausted, and fed up. You’ll want to give up but don’t — push through.

Why? Because once you push through the dark parts, you get to enjoy the shiny, beautiful moments.

Just think about when you go hiking. Sometimes it’s challenging. You’re experiencing incline changes and at times, it might be hard to breathe. You don’t turn around and go back down the trail. You take a deep breath, drink some water, and push through because the view at the top of the mountain is well worth the struggle.

But guess what? Entrepreneurship isn’t anything like a hike up the mountain. Unless that mountain was covered in booby tarps with a Big Foot, randomly throwing you off the cliff and a stork occasionally picking you up. Building a business is filled with surprises and loops, so your persistence doesn’t equal success.

We live in this fantasy where we expect everything to be easy. With social media, it seems that everything is within our reach. All we have to do is work hard and we’ll get to the top fast.

Scroll through your Instagram feed. Fellow entrepreneurs are in stunning coworking spaces and hustling hard. At night, their Instagram stories show them sipping cocktails and networking at the new bar in town. This isn’t reality. This is a selected reality.

What you’re not seeing are their bad days. The days where they are stricken in fear about whether or not their venture will make it. The days where they’re in tears over not getting the funding they’ve prepped the last month to get. On those days, they’re not posting.

But why not?

Because it’s not sexy to say you failed. Entrepreneurs preach from the rooftops that failing is learning yet when they do fail, they shut up. People who are succeeding love to talk about failing, because they’re not being slapped in the face with it.

You don’t have to struggle alone. You don’t have to pretend everything is okay. You don’t have to post the pic of you in WeWork living you’re best entrepreneurial life. Instead, post something real. Let people know what you’re going through. People want to help.

Don’t wait until you’ve reached success to start talking about the struggle. Stop faking it.