You suck. You’re not going hard enough. Everyone is better than you. You have no talent. Just…quit.

These are the thoughts that run through my mind on a weekly basis.

Being an entrepreneur is one of the hardest career paths especially, if you’re starting from nothing.

Entrepreneurs are required to have a level of faith that most people would deem as being “unrealistic.”

You could work for weeks, months, and even years before seeing any type of gratification. And on the flip side, you could experience instant gratification. See, that’s the thing with being an entrepreneur, you just never know.

The “come-up” phase is the hardest part of entrepreneurship. This is the part where you jump out the window and pray there is something that’ll break your fall. On the way down, that’s where you meet depression, anxiety, doubt, fear, loneliness and rejection.

All of those negative emotions at once can leave you feeling like you’re suffocating and no one can or wants to help you. It makes you feel like your dream isn’t worth the pain.

On the way down, you see other people blissfully going up. You wonder why them and not you? You try to position your body like theirs hoping it’ll send you up too.

It doesn’t work.

Your body won’t move that way.

You think of opting out of the entrepreneurial lifestyle and settle for the safer pedestrian life. But something in you won’t let you quit. So, you keep falling.

The longer you fall, the more comfortable you become with being uncomfortable.

You become resilient.

When depression, anxiety, doubt, fear, loneliness and rejection try to snuff you out, you surprise yourself by fighting back.

When you see people going up while you’re going down, it has no bearing on you. You stop trying to move like them and begin to create your own movements.

Next thing you know, you reach the bottom.

But what awaits you is a soft spring that propels you into the sky.

You find yourself going up 10x faster than the ones who were looking down on you as they went up.

You get so high that you pass the sky and you leave others asking “How?”.

It might even look like it happened overnight.

See, what they don’t know is that “it takes years to become an overnight success.”

Keep pushing.

We’ll reach that soft spring eventually.

Xo,

Shiloh