If you can't fly then run, if you can't run then walk, if you can't walk then crawl, but whatever you do, you have to keep moving forward. Martin Luther King Jr.
It's been crawling for a while. You go all in, you think you make all the right moves, you put yourself in the right position, the road ahead looks wide open... And just in a moment you realize that all odds are suddenly against you. The fucking roadblock. And what do you do?
It would be easy to make excuses. It would be perhaps even justified to stop. Have I thought about quitting? Oh, I have. No heroes here. It's far from feeling unstoppable. If the last couple of years have been a testing period, then it's been a good one. And what a lesson. Looking a little bit from the hindsight now, I actually think it's also a blessing in disguise...
Nobody said it would be easy. Actually, everybody says it’s always difficult. To build your own thing, to start from the scratch. Road of an entrepreneur is never straightforward and downhill. At the beginning, it’s rather a constant climbing with little safety. One wrong move, unexpected circumstance like sudden storm and you are about to fall off a cliff. What awaits then is just a rock bottom. No glory land.
So why to even go this way? It costs so much in a material way, but mentally it costs even more. Sleepless nights, constant thinking in search of optimal solutions and right decisions. There are no guarantees, hardly anybody really offering a helping hand, so many times you feel like a small boat on the ocean. And which directions to go?
And even if there is a great vision, there is faith, hard work, determination and there is a good plan, it still guarantees nothing. You might feel prepared for all possible scenarios. But how to be prepared for the unexpected? How to predict something which is unpredictable? I don’t think you can. You either face it or you quit.
The pandemic has hit us as many others. In a hard way. It blocked us and has made a lot of damage. I heard people felt sorry, but I have actually never felt a victim. In some inexplicable way, it has helped me to understand some fundamentals. It gave time for reflections and opened my eyes to what this is all about.
The first lesson should be that if you lose in something that is not depended on you, then you lose really nothing. And you might even lose your entire business and it still really means nothing. There might be down moments, but when you have family and friends behind you, nothing tragic will really happen. We should have dreams, goals, aspirations. It’s necessary to move forward in order to keep the balance, but it is not in our personal achievements where the fulfillment is. The sooner you realize, the better life you live.
Winston Churchill once said If you're going through hell, keep going. The one lesson is that there is always a chance you will survive, and the other, that you will come stronger out of it. I have not been going through hell. That would be a major overstatement. I might be going through turbulent times, but I have lost really nothing of real importance, then why should I even complain? I should not. There are people going through real hells in their lives. And I am just extremely lucky in mine.
In difficult times you just learn who really cares about you. Maybe there are just a few of them, but that is enough. It’s so unmeasured what the value of love at home really is. It’s so invaluable to have somebody to call to when you need to. Just to have somebody to listen and to understand. The rest does not really matter that much.
This journey is far from over. It’s still the stormy weather outside and nobody knows how much longer it is going to last. So is it still worth it? Now, I have no doubts, no more. After the two years of crawling, the landscapes are somehow changing now. The darkness is not so dark anymore. It’s time to get up on the feet again. The late Kobe Bryant once said: Great things come from hard work and perseverance. No excuses.
So, let’s fucking go!