Musings on Overconfidence and Self-Employment

First, let me get the shameless plug out of the way. Go buy kick-ass t-shirts at Springheel Jack or by them at "friend prices" here. Women dig them!

The first 24-hours of having my business open have humbled me, quite frankly. In retrospect, I think it's impossible for one not to have inflated expectations when starting self-employment. One must be slightly out of touch with reality to fling oneself off the cliff of "steady employment" and believe he or she can fly. It takes delusions of grandeur to believe you can succeed at something that doesn't even exist yet. One must have big dreams to forge a new path, and big dreams can infect the mind and lead to unrealistic expectations. I learned yesterday that I was not immune.

Big dreams can also lead to pessimism. Everyone has good days and bad days. On bad days, the days when reality creeps in around the edges, it's hard to keep the dark thoughts away. I'll never make it. What was I thinking? I wonder if can still get a job at Starbuck's.

Bad days come without warning because they start like any other. They seem to break upon you like the flood waters overtaking a levee. All of a sudden, you're under water. You don't even know where the water came from. Your product is late or missing. Your vendor won't return your phone calls. You've made a very expensive gamble on a website and lost. You've just opened for business and no one has shown up.

For me, when the water is at my feet and I can't see the high ground, I think about the good days, the days that make it all worth it. I think about how I felt the day I saw my first shirts being made. I liken it to what a proud parent must feel like at the birth of their first child. Or, I think about the day when my tags came in the mail and I saw my logo in cloth for the very first time. That particular moment brought home and made real to me what I had been doing those past few months. My company was no longer theoretical; it was real because I had the proof in my hand.

The high points keep you going, certainly, but the low points, such as yesterday, serve their purpose too. They are the high watermarks you look back on and remind yourself that you survived; you lived to tell the tale. You think about the struggle and what it took to make it, and the success is all the sweeter for it.

Fortunately for me, I have friends who gently remind me of such things. They, who have battle scars and war stories of their own to share, remind me that many, who have dared to dream, stumbled and fell along the way and still managed to succeed. It is certainly so, and because of my friends, today is a good day.