Last December, I made a huge commitment: I hired my first full-time partner. After carefully monitoring the revenue of my website all year, I decided to take the plunge, and, thankfully, my partner accepted the offer. Two days later, I received an email that set off a chain of events, and less than 30 days later, our revenue had dropped 60%. Welcome to entrepreneurship.
Luckily, I’m paranoid about money and could afford to cross-fund his salary from my other ventures while we came up with ideas for new sources of income. I’m proud of us not panicking, of my transparency and his flexibility, and of the plan we came up with. Sadly, it didn’t work. So we did it again.
If necessity is the mother of invention, struggle is the mother of reinventing yourself.
Meanwhile, a new disease started wreaking havoc around the planet — and more economic fallout followed. Throughout all this, I’ve been lucky. My “job” is still functional. I already worked from home. My overall income hasn’t been cut in half. But when you run a business of which one part is unprofitable for months and then all sources of income start shrinking, that’s still not fun.
A week ago, we launched the second attempt at getting my website into the green — and that also failed. I was angry. I was frustrated. “Why is nothing working? I just want to feel like one thing is working!” Finally, after a weekend of bad sleep and frantic pacing in my apartment, something clicked. My perspective changed. Suddenly, I wasn’t stuck anymore, I was free — free to try random things.
Throwing Planning Out the Window
At some point, when failure seems to pop up all around you, it’s time to throw careful planning out the window. So far, your deliberation has kept you stuck in this situation — maybe improvisation can get you out of it. If necessity is the mother of invention, struggle is the mother of reinventing yourself.
Before my “screw it” moment a few days ago, I was still thinking strategically. “Can this new service recover all our lost revenue? Does it make sense for the overall vision of the company?” In a crisis, these things don’t matter. What matters are the tactics that keep you in the game.
Maybe, I’ll have to launch three new mini projects to make up for the shortfall. Maybe, they’ll be unrelated to the website. Maybe, I’ll discontinue them again in six months. But right now, who cares? What’s important is going back to being profitable.
You might not be an entrepreneur, but most likely, the crisis has introduced some form of struggle into your life too. Did you lose your job? Are you hobby-less now? Did you start fighting with your partner while being stuck at home? Whatever it is that’s not working, maybe it’s time to stop treating it like a barricade tape wrapped around your normal life and start looking for solutions beyond “how can I get this back to zero?” Whatever your life will look like after this crisis, it won’t feel like the life you had before regardless. That life is gone, and that’s a reality we all have to accept.
I don’t blame you. Trying to regain the status quo is a natural, human reaction to loss, even if it’s often an effort in vain and not the best strategy to begin with. If we accept the loss for what it is, usually, we can find a way to make our lives not just whole again but better than they were before. As long as we’re stuck in the status quo mindset, however, we won’t see the paths that lead there.
You won’t get your job back. Look for a new one. Find a new hobby. Address the underlying issues with your partner that cause the fighting, rather than blaming your new lifestyle for no longer letting you avoid the problem. How do you do these things? By trying a bunch of random stuff and seeing what sticks.
Welcome to the new world, where none of us has a clue what we’re doing, and we’re all just inventing ourselves as we go along. Of course, life has always been this way. It’s just that, in the comfort of everyday life, we often forget. When there’s no need to fight for “better,” “normal” is good enough. And then we struggle to get “normal” back when it disappears. If we succeed, nothing changes. Only once we fail do we begin to wonder: What if I tried something new altogether?
Since my breakthrough, I’ve come up not with one, not with two, but with four new ideas on how I can quickly generate money. I’m in the process of testing all of them at the same time. Will one of them work? I have no idea, but if one does, I’ll double down on it until I can think of a better one. All I know is, for the first time this year, I’m having a lot of fun at work — despite not yet solving a single problem.
That’s the thing about business: Sometimes, the tactics should inform the strategy. Temporary solutions can become long-term fixes if they work well and end up being more fun than you imagined. Who knows? You might even find your new job, your new hobby, your new identity more enjoyable than your old one. Ultimately, that’s what this whole ordeal is really about: Getting closer to authenticity, to who you really want to become.
A year ago, I wrote that “struggling is not the only way you can grow.” It’s true. When things are going well, we keep finding new ways of making ourselves miserable, then wear them like badges of honor.
Now, I finally found the corollary to this insight: When you’re already struggling, don’t waste your strife by staying the person you were before it found you. Use this challenge to grow. “Normal” is gone, so you might as well turn “worse” into “better.” It may not have been the timing you wanted, but it was the excuse you needed. The time to reinvent yourself is now.