Bravery… or something like it…

I write this post with a heavy heart.  There is so much sadness in the world right now with tragedies multiplying by the day.  Of course, my topic has nothing to do with those catastrophes.  Mine has to do with sex.

For months now, I’ve been working on a covert project that consumed countless hours of my “spare” time.  Although I’m quite successful in my current career, I had hoped to augment my income through a new product that would help people enrich their sex lives.

After an exhaustive amount of research and market testing, I knew this was poised to be a huge success.  However, instead of approaching this with excitement, I found myself merely going through the motions of building this product, continually plagued with internal resistance.

Like many entrepreneurs would, I passed it off as fear. I continued pressing on, only to find myself dreading new discoveries and mentally shutting down when the content got too deep for my tastes.  It took weeks before I allowed myself an opportunity to take a real inventory as to what was going on.

After finally running through all the reasons I wanted to do this versus the reasons I didn’t, I realized I was building toward a dead-end.  But why? How?

I ignored something so simple, so necessary, so critical to the success of any entrepreneur’s journey…

I forgot to ask myself if I would do it for free.

What I realized is that I was so focused on building what I thought would be a successful source of income that I neglected to ask whether this was a niche I would want to produce, promote or protect. Instead of building a freedom business, I was designing an emotional death sentence.  And no, I’m not insane. In fact, I bet this could happen to anyone…

This business I was building was solely for profit.  I actually convinced myself that I was passionate about something I had no real connection to because I was blinded by my goals of getting out of debt. My drive to succeed in this venture had little to do with the mission and everything to do with the dollar.  For many, the dollar is enough.  For me, I need a reason or I will be miserable.

My niche and I officially called it quits this week and my heart is broken.  It feels like I just ended a relationship that wasn’t bad, but it just wasn’t right.  You know… the kind where kisses are just lips touching and when you look at the other person, all you feel is a sense of longing to feel something other than what you do.  Only now that it’s over, I’m left to figure out how to move on…

Having survived a fair amount of disagreeable events in my life, you might think it’d be easy to pick myself up again after failing a business venture I never even launched.  It sounds so stupid to even say.  But it was real to me, and knowing all the time and effort I put into dotting every “i” and crossing every “t” makes it hurt that much more.  I want to tell myself I made a huge mistake, but the smarter me (yes, on occasion there is more than one “me” in my head) knows that’s not the truth.

I believe this couldn’t have been a mistake.  My coach has been enlightening me with his views on faith in business and according to the Gospel of Truant, things happen for a reason.

So now, as it seems, I need to put away the cosmic chocolate ice cream, turn off the damn Meg Ryan movie and learn the lesson I obviously needed to learn…

Then, with a little bravery or something like it, you may soon see what I’ve found I would do for free… And hopefully you’ll buy some for everyone you know…