Early this month, I had a mini-burnout and I was this |~| close to hanging up my boots. The creative entrepreneurial life turned out more daunting than I anticipated and I wasn’t used to this level of psychological stress. So I decided to backtrack and check if I had been in a similar situation and how I got out of it. As expected, you don’t call yourself a risk junkie and not face dream threatening situations. Before I tell you how I got over my mini-burnout, permit me to indulge you in two stories from my life.
In the summer of 2017, I committed a lot of resources into trying to build a social network for people of similar interests. The idea was one that a lot of people admired. “I knew you were going to build one of em billion dollar platforms”, my cousin, Edyson, always said. It was so serious that I took skype meetings with potential investors and partners. I remember spending hours sketching “ugly” interfaces of what the app would look like, preparing pitch decks for different partners and investors, actually getting a partner that agreed to handle the development of the app, getting the support of an investor to put in money when we had made some traction. I know it sounds like everything was going great but it wasn’t.
Salchat had a lot of potentials but then there was the problem of starting capital. I didn’t have the slightest clue what I would do to raise the money needed to launch the platform and so one night, after and a lot of deliberation, I called it quits. Everyone was disappointed even if they wouldn’t tell me to my face, I could feel it because I was disappointed. I had put in so much money and man hours that I thought I would never give up. Well, I didn’t see the effect of quitting at the time because I immediately jumped on emall.ng (I know, I’m a risk junkie). A couple of months ago, I was opportune to speak at a leadership conference alongside three other speakers and being a conversationalist, I immediately hit it off with another speaker. He was much older and carried a wealth of experience and knowledge I couldn’t help but be humbled by. One thing led to another and I told him about Salchat and the excuses I made up for quitting.
While I was yammering away, he stopped me and said “but you don’t really know if you were going to fail, do you?” and right at that moment, I heard myself asking the question what if? What if I hadn’t given up on the dream? What if I had stuck to the plan and built the app? I felt like a loser at that point because I knew I had given up on something good and it made me realise that this is what losers do, they dream about the life they want, like winners, make plans and at the first sight of an obstacle, they cut their losses,go back to being mediocre and then they blame everyone but themselves. The weeks that followed were spent on pondering why losers give up and then it dawned on me, everybody dreams but not everyone is ambitious enough to see their dreams through.
On the mini-burnout, emall.ng wasn’t growing at the pace I had envisioned, my marketing plans weren’t converting or even going as planned, I was in a lot of debt and I couldn’t see a way through. So, I did what all smart people do, I took a nap.
“When it seems like there’s no way through, sleep on it”
Now, I couldn’t understand the phrase because I held this belief that sleep doesn’t take your problems away, it just postpones them. But I slept anyway and probably because I was tired but on waking up, I realised I had one more move to make. I had to either swallow my pride or give up on building emall.ng and so I asked myself, what if? What if I gave emall.ng another chance?
Writing this article, I have realised the difference between winners and losers is that winners are always asking what if as a sign of motivation and losers only ask what if as a sign of regret.
What if being ambitious is worth it?
Everyone dreams but the difference are our levels of commitment. How bad do you want to achieve your dreams?
Comment down below, let’s have a conversation. What is that one thing you’d love to achieve in the next 6 months? What plans have you set out?
