The biggest delusion in entrepreneurship

If business feels especially hard for you right now, it’s time to turn this attitude upside down and inside out. In this episode, I draw on Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, as well as 18 years in self-employment, with a hefty dose of unhinged dose of perimenopause-fuelled candour, to offer you something far better than toxic positivity: hard fun. You’ll hear:

• How to turn “it’ll get easier” into what’s actually true
• A gloriously honest list of what is genuinely hard about self-employment, from having your prices negotiated by strangers, to being shut out of rooms where decisions are being made, to psyching yourself up every single morning to believe this whole thing is a great idea
• The compounding long-term payoffs of staying in business that nobody talks about
• Forget consistency, instead we examine why agility of mind is the key thing that keeps you in thriving, profitable business for years to come.

If business feels hard right now, this episode reframes what that actually means. Your deposit hasn’t yet reached maturity, that’s all. Keep going.

Welcome to Meaningful Work Remarkable Life. I’m your host Brook McCarthy and I’m a business coach, trainer and speaker living and working on the unceded lands of the Camargo people here in Sydney, Australia. In this podcast, we explore the paradoxes inherent in working for love and money, magnifying your impact and doing work you feel born to do. We explore the intersections of the meanings we bring to work and the meanings we derive from work.

I first heard about this book, The Artist’s Way, because one of my clients recommended it. She said, “I’m doing your business program. I’m reading the book at the same time and it’s absolutely perfectly complemented.” And she wondered whether I’d read it and whether I’d gotten some of the ideas from The Artist’s Way, which, having read it years later, was a beautiful compliment.

So I did read it. I did get my hands on a copy and I read it and I had bookmarked it and I wrote in the boundaries and put post-it notes throughout. And late last year, I read it again around the same time that I went to Sri Lanka. So it turned out to be a serendipitous emotional time to be doing The Artist’s Way. And I did it with an accountability group. Shout out to Frankie Radford for getting the group together. And when I did it again, I really only managed the morning pages because it is a big program—a big, chunky program—and I just couldn’t afford the time required. But I did do the morning pages and I read the book again.

And there was a post-it note that I transcribed onto, now aged and dog-eared. It is: “It is far harder and more painful to be a blocked artist than it is to do the work. It’s far harder to be blocked than to be doing the work.”

So this is our season, all about failure—because yay, I’m fun like that. And this is for you if you are blocked, stuck, overwhelmed, existentially crisis-ing, perhaps you have been denying yourself your desire, which has been squatting in your head and heart for years of starting your own business, or maybe many, many years into it. And you are stuck.

And one of the reasons—having done business coaching for 14 long years now—and this is one of the things that I see over and over and over and over again is the delusions that we carry, which create the pain. One of the biggest delusions and most common delusions, regardless of how many years you’ve been in business, is that somehow or another, it’s going to be easy.

I had a conversation at a business conference not too long ago and a woman was telling me about how she was trying to get this group program off the ground and it was really hard and it wasn’t working and she was only selling a few spots. And she said, “Oh, God, I thought it’d be so much easier.” I said, “Where did you get the idea it’d be easy?” She said, “Just, you know, my business coach said it’d be really easy. My business coach is teaching me how to do it.” It ain’t easy. It definitely ain’t easy.

And we keep thinking it will be, right? We’re like, “Okay, I’ve been doing this for several years, five years, ten years, fifteen years. Surely, surely, surely it’s going to get easy. Surely it’s going to get easy.” But amid the maddening complex paradoxes of being in business, I have finally landed on a term. And the term is: hard fun.

This is my attempt to express what this is, and it’s the closest I’ve gotten so far to sum it up. Hard fun—this is what self-employment is.

So business is hard. It’s hard in ways that we don’t first consider. It pushes you up against your conditioning, and that becomes clearly and immediately obvious. The most accelerated form of self-development that I know. It triggers our unresolved issues. It highlights the best parts of our social conditioning, the worst parts of our social conditioning. It provokes and pokes at our insecurities. It showcases our beliefs around power, around money, around identity—around who we are, what we stand for, what we stand against.

What is hard is the enduring uncertainty. And this, in my opinion, is the number one reason that clients close their doors. I have seen innumerable business owners go back into the workforce, not because they’re not profitable, not because they’re not deriving a healthy salary from their business, not because they don’t have a healthy pipeline of future leads and clients, but because they cannot deal with the enduring stress of uncertainty, of not knowing, of ambiguity.

What is hard is having your prices questioned and negotiated by strangers who make it feel really personal, like they are deeply offended that you’re trying to take the food from the mouths of babes.

What is hard is feeling like there are conversations being had, decisions being made, opportunities being given behind closed doors and you’re just getting an inkling of it. You’re not really sure what exactly is going on, but you’ve got a pretty strong sense of it, and you’re not sure what door it’s going on behind. Because if you knew that, you’d knock on that damn door. And for an added kick in the guts, you introduced those same people who are now passing business and opportunities between each other and not even letting you know about it.

What’s hard is taking in the tsunami of advice and opinions and information on what you should do and must do and couldn’t do and totally be an absolute idiot to try, and this is dead and that’s dying and “Oh my God, you’d be a fool if you did this,” and “you’ve got to do it this way” and “this is essential” and “this is absolutely pivotal” and “the three essential steps” and dah, dah, dah. And it’s all contradictory.

What’s hard is giving your hours and your efforts and your emotions and your favours to a client, sometimes for years, and then having them drop you with nary a backward glance, let alone an honest conversation as to why they’re moving on.

What is hard is the constant and ongoing skill development. The diversity of roles we take on, the frequent task-hopping, the project management, keeping all the balls kicking along the field—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine projects at the same go. And somehow or another making time to do your own marketing, your own business development.

What is hard is listening to others who suck the oxygen out of the room, talking the big game when you know for a fact that they’re lacking in integrity, expertise and experience. Whilst you also know that you couldn’t possibly talk yourself up the way that they appear to do so, so effortlessly.

What’s hard is this passive-aggressiveness or overt judgment from friends and family who will rush to tell you kindly how much they wish you well and how brave you are with your little business, whilst keeping their contact book firmly closed and expecting you to work for them for free. But they will pay you in a compliment.

What’s hardest perhaps is the stamina to psych yourself up to believe that—even if just for a few hours every single morning—this endeavour of yours is a great idea, that people want what you’ve got, and that you are indeed living the dream.

It is hard to see others living the dream on the internet when you feel like you are stuck in the sludge.

So around 2014 was the height of glamorising online businesses by fetishising its accompanying lifestyle. There was so much on Instagram about making more money, doing what you love, simply to be you. And a popular marketing refrain at the time was “get paid to be yourself.” Just the other day, I saw this exact same line in somebody’s Instagram. There you go. Looked a bit outdated to me, but it felt weird because it is weird and it’s also madly enticing.

And I was overworked at the time. I was underpaid at the time. I had two small children, living the dream, working from home, working for myself with my partner, also working for himself, also working from home—all chaos, all of the time.

And so I resented this message greatly, and I would look at women with flawless complexions, big hair, twenty-something-year-olds, and I would think, I would judge, “I bet she doesn’t have children.” And these people were declaring that all we needed to do was sit in our feminine power and receive.

Of course, it’s easy to find fault with other people when you are stuck in the hurt of your own dashed hopes and expectations and lost opportunities. And this “live in the dream” lifestyle is coming back in vogue, as everything does with pendulum swings, with the soft girl era. This is the newest reinvention of the same old, same old.

So my children are older now. They need me a lot less. Perimenopause has increased my “give less fucks” attitude, and I have an enduring desire for fun. I was brought up by a couple of headheads. I was brought up in a family where all of us were schooled in the art of throwing a party. And maybe I’m the arsehole now. Maybe others are looking at me on Instagram and retorting, “Must be nice.” I don’t know. But what I do know is that the more that I lean in to having fun and the more I let go of the delusion that it’s somehow supposed to be simple and neat and easy, the more fun I actually have.

Because this is the bit that most people overlook: the agility and flexibility of mind. Not only does it enable us to better manage our emotions on a day-to-day level, but it also enables us to invest in long-term work without added guarantees—that long-term delayed gratification that may or may not pay off.

And if you think about it, well, marketing kind of falls under that, right? Marketing, even though hopefully you’re doing it every day, is one of those delayed gratifications. It is a lagging metric. It doesn’t have any paid guarantee. So it’s easy to delude yourself and say, “Oh, it’s not important. You know, it won’t actually pay off. I need work right now that pays off.” I’m busy, busy, until the project finishes and you’ve got no work.

So that agility to keep adapting to conditions—even from one year to the next, or even within the space of a single hour—this is what has kept me in business for 18 years and hopefully in business for the next 18. It is being okay with that ambiguity, with that volatility, with that not knowing. It is that expectation that things will go wrong and not expecting otherwise. And when we expect things to go wrong, we don’t have a stress response to it because it’s like, “Ah.”

When I reflect back on my progress and I feel good about myself, this is one of the things I feel most proud of: that things that used to completely knock me off the perch and leave me in a funk or a spiral for days or weeks are nowadays barely a blip. Maybe I’m in a bad mood for an hour, come up with a plan, move on to the next thing.

Because the thing is, a lot of these long-term things—they pay off over time. There’s a compounding effect that happens of being in business.

Number one: the relationships. The relationships that you pour into, the people that you love on, that you support, that you say nice things about, that you are kind to, that you notice, that you see and hear and acknowledge, that you treat as equals—these relationships pay off.

The emotional intelligence, the self-insight. We’re investing in our character. This is something we have to keep noticing. This is something we need to make deliberate. We’re developing our people skills over time, which means we’re naturally better at sales and marketing. And having invested in people skills, having gotten better at emotional intelligence and social intelligence, we know what personality types find us grating—charming as we are attempting to be. We know the personality types that we just don’t do well with. And conversely, we know the mutual admiration society that’s possible when we’re working with our ideal clients. And therefore we can feed that back into our marketing.

The long-term benefits and payoffs is that self-trust—that deep self-trust, that trust in our own wisdom, our own intuition, which means that our actions become far more effective. We don’t overthink things. We’re no longer deluding ourselves that it’ll be easy. And we have absolute utmost faith. We are unwavering in our commitment to what we’re doing. We might be evolving our business model, changing our pricing, changing our structures, changing our terms and conditions, changing our offerings, changing our operations and our software and all the rest, but we are unwavering in what we’re doing overall.

And this is where the magic of hard fun starts to bear fruit, because I finally realised, agog with amazement, that perhaps I really am living the 2014 dream. I am being paid—well paid—to share my opinion. People are paying me for my point of view.

So it’s a fine thing indeed when hard fun pays off, and it will. It will, darling owner.

If you are feeling stuck, overwhelmed, if you are feeling like, “Goddamn it, this should be easier by now. Why aren’t these things working? I’m doing the things. I’m diligently doing the minimum viable marketing. I’m pitching, I’m reaching out, I’m investing in my relationships. I’m doing good work, I’m refining my processes. I’m becoming better and better and better every day and it’s not paid off”—please know, darling owner, this is an infinite game that we are playing. It is a game. We need to gamify it. We need to stop taking ourselves so damn seriously.

You have done hard things. Maybe you have pushed a baby out of your vajayjay. Maybe without any pain relief, like some kind of weirdo. I had two babies, one with pain relief and one without. That was like night and day.

If you have lived any life at all, you would have experienced hard things. You would have survived hard things. You would have not just endured hard things, but if you gave yourself a goddamn break and reflected back, you’d realise what an utter legend you are—to have lived, not just lived through what you’ve lived through, but to actually have thrived.

So if it feels hard, if business feels hard right now, all it means is that your deposit hasn’t yet reached maturity. That’s it. That’s all. Keep dancing. Keep going. The song is still playing.

Real quick before you go, if this episode has gotten you thinking, gotten you excited, or has you changing the way that you do business or life, would you do me a super quick favour and write me a short review? Your podcast review means so much to me, and it helps other values-based business owners just like you to find this show, which is a fantastic gift to me.