Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
I just made my first purchase for my first company. The first commitment of personal dollars to a project in which I see serious potential. After toying around the fringes of entrepreneurship for months, if not years, I’m committing. I’ve read all the books, listened to the podcasts, perused the blogs- but have only sat on the sidelines. Until now.
I am simultaneously full of exhilaration while also utterly terrified.
My path until this was pretty straight forward. I am about to leave the military and was planning on taking the money I saved on three deployments to travel the world for 8 months and then start an MBA. The plan was to find a business partner and start a company. There’s a number of ideas rattling around in my head and I figured someone else and I could make at least one of them happen. Worst case, I use my MBA to get a regular job to buy me some time while I work on something. This all seemed logical, with a fair rate of success, and the risk well-mitigated.
But then I found a business partner and we found a problem and made a solution.
And now I have to chase it down.
I spent all my time in the military serving in airborne units- jumping out of planes was just a part of my job. Conventional jumping in the military is fairly straight-forward. It is a very systematized method where everyone stands in a line, prepares themself to jump, and then follows the person in front of them out the door to jump out of the plane.
Through the process, much of your motivation is just a herd mentality of doing what everyone else is doing. But at the critical moment of having to jump, you still have to jump out of an airplane with nothing but some fabric and string to bring you down to the ground.
No one can make that jump for you, only you can.
And so I eschewed my plans to pursue this new idea.
Before you mention all the things, I have money saved for this reason, have family close by to help me out, and have accepted the fact that I will likely have to get some form of employment to help keep the lights on.
But I had to jump.
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