The topic of fear seems to be very prevalent through Wes and I's posts, so I figured since we are living in a transparent world I would give you a little bit of a personal story about our journey with fear as our copilot. It seems that fear is everywhere and is very contagious among everyone, even if you cannot recognize its presence, believe me it is not too far away.
Our journey began almost two years ago when I had just finished up my senior year of college at the University of Delaware, and started my working career at a financial services firm. It was at this firm that I met Wes, and within a week or so of working there, we already started scheming ways to better the so-called process to success. Now, its not because we just wanted to be defiant, rather we saw this process as something that may or may not create success for some people. It seemed also that this process was giving others an excuse to remain mediocre, and paralyzing them in an optimistic state, dreaming that someday one big deal would come that would catapult them out of mediocrity. It was at this moment that we needed to make a decision: should we conform and be stuck in the ever so contagious fearful environment or develop our own thing. Being it as though we are both very ambitious, we felt that conforming would just not suffice, so we began creating our own process of shooting for the stars. One thing that gave us a little encouragement along the way, was something Wes' dad had said to him, "If you go after the the big things and fail, you will learn the steps to reach the top, but if you never try, you will never know what the top is or how to get there." With this encouragement and various small successes, we became students of our industry and derived a process that seemed to get us into places and meet people that we would have never expected. It was the lessons from our time at that firm, that Wes and I will never forget and will carry alongside of us throughout our working lives.
So, not to soon after we started our own thing, came the time when we realized that financial services was not either one of our true callings, and that we were meant to do bigger things; thus the planning for Verge became our nights and weekends for the next 4 months. Now, if you ask does it really take that long to plan a business, my answer would be NO WAY. The reason that it took us this long was that (1) we didn't know exactly what we were going to do, and (2) fear and pressure were hanging above our heads. It took until the beginning of March until we finally mustered up the courage to quit our jobs to venture out on our own. I cannot tell how great of a feeling it was to clear my desk and walk out of the corporate world to become my own boss, but that feeling soon became HOLY $*@T, I am my own boss. I honestly don't think I got too much sleep that night, thinking about all the "What Ifs?", and the feeling of "What do I do now." Then I remembered this saying I once heard, "You should embrace fear or the feeling of butterflies, because that feeling is when you can tell you are on the path to growth." It is simple little things like this that I continue to tell myself along my entrepreneurial journey.
Since this post is to be transparent and talk a little about fear, I will give a little insight to how fear affects me to this day. To be quite honest, every step towards the goal of launching The coIN Loft have had their ups and downs. Immediately upon reading into the concept of coworking, I felt that this was something I needed to be part of in some sort of way. After finding that there were no spaces in Delaware, the decision became that Wes and I were just going to have to start a space ourselves. At the time it seemed like a no-brainer, however soon after reality caught up and I started to think is Delaware the right place, maybe there isn't a space in Delaware for a reason, would anyone in Delaware see the same value that I did by working amongst other like-minded individuals, etc. Then came the money part, this is a big investment in a business that does not seem to be very easy to break-even in. These thoughts continue to be in my head at all times, a lot of times depriving me of sleep, however each morning I wake, pumped to be one day closer to satisfying the goal of launching Delaware's first coworking space. You see I am more scared of the feeling of regret, than the feeling of failure. Both Wes and I are the type of people that want the ball at the end of the game knowing we need to make something happen, and we have found that this pressure and fear is actually our internal drive that will ultimately make us successful. The coIN Loft is our way of introducing change, and encouraging the people of Delaware that as a community we can make some really cool stuff happen, key part being that community is the catalyst.
I know this post has been kind of erratic but the point of what I am trying to say can all be summed up in a quote I thought of this morning: "Fear is contagious and sometimes crippling, but it is how you channel that fear that can ultimately make you wildly successful."
