Day 1: Tackling my fears
Last Friday, I did what millions around the world dream of doing. I quit my job to become a micropreneur and travel the world.
I’m still trying to fully own this decision. I can feel myself wanting to write a deflecting comment like, “Honestly, the whole Tim Ferriss 4-hour-workweek thing is a scam and I’m probably going to fail, but if I don’t try I’ll go crazy.”
But it’s not true. I don’t believe it’s a scam. What I believe is that most people believe it can’t happen and that I have the right amount of privilege, luck, knowledge and pluck (in that order) to pull it off.
I want to minimize my decision because I’m afraid of three things:
- Falling back into selling my time too quickly
- Rabbit holes
- Marketing
Falling back into selling my time too quickly
This is my most pressing fear, in the sense that I have an interview for a freelance gig in 35 minutes and I fear that I’m falling into a trap. I know myself, and my fear is that if I accept freelance gigs, I’m not going to have the energy and focus to make my entrepreneurial dreams come true.
(I don’t want to do it but I’m too afraid to say no to the money to call it off. Should I call it off?)
Rabbit holes
I’m a programmer by trade. I take pride in architecting perfect, elegant, scalable technical solutions.
Too much pride. I hesitate to ship anything short of technical perfection. (I can hear my old coworkers laughing already, but it’s true!) And so I get led down unending programming rabbit holes.
My favorite rabbit holes are infrastructure (e.g., “Dockerize all the things!”) and templates (e.g., “If I figure out the perfect way to write a generic service class in Ruby, I’ll never have to build a bike shed again.”)
I’m afraid of rabbit holes because they prevent me from shipping. But rabbit holes in reality are just a way for me to avoid my real fear, which is marketing.
Marketing
Let’s be clear about my strengths. I’m a charismatic, emotionally sensitive dreamer with a relatively high IQ and some solid programming skills. Hustling doesn’t come naturally to me.
My natural instinct when faced with a product is deep cynicism. Heh, just another capitalist trap to make me spend money, waste natural resources and draw me further into the illusion of consumerism. I own literally three shirts. Is it any wonder that I can’t find it in me to sell?
Fundamentally, though, I suspect that my pessimism is driven by a lack of self-confidence.
So how do I tackle my fears?
Writing about it helps tremendously. In the time that I spent writing this post, I removed what was originally a fourth fear from my list, “failure.” I saw that my vague generic fear could be broken down into components. When I write about each component openly, it becomes less scary.
That said, I don’t have all the answers.
I’m new to owning my destiny and actually living my life the way that I want to live it. It’s going to take a while to figure out.
