I almost went back.

Nine months into building my business I started looking at job postings again. I never applied to any of them. I would open my laptop at night after a long day and scroll through roles. LinkedIn was very good at recommending the ones that were a good fit. I would think about the two I had turned down before I started, secretly hoping something like them would come back around. I never told anyone about these late night searches.

From the outside nothing had changed. I was still going to events and connecting with potential clients. When people asked how the business was going I told them it was going well. It was true enough because there were some warm leads. But I had decided something about myself by then: I was not good at this. So it almost felt like lying.

The work was never the hard part. Once a client is in the door I am in my zone. I can quickly spot the root cause and come up with potential solutions. Problem solving and connecting the dots is my superpower. That part has always come naturally to me.

The hunt is where I struggled. Finding the right people and the multiple rounds of prospecting. The follow-ups, the waiting, and the ghosting. The person who was enthusiastic three weeks ago but will not answer an email. I found all of it draining. After nine months of doing it badly I stopped thinking of it as something I was learning and started thinking of it as something I was not built for.

One Friday I was talking with another business owner and we were both venting a little about the hardest part of this new thing we were doing. She was in the same place I was, good at the work and worn down by everything that had to happen before it.

At some point I said it plainly. I don’t like hunting.

She said, me either.

And then I heard myself add something I had not planned to say. Maybe we’re just not good at hunting yet.

That one word changed the temperature of the whole conversation. It gave us room to be new at something without deciding that being new at it meant we were incapable.

I said the right thing that Friday and then went home and kept doing exactly what I had been doing. Saying it took five seconds. What it actually asked for was that I go back out and make another call I was going to be bad at, and then another one after that, with nothing coming back in between to tell me any of it was working.

Nobody rolls out of bed good at anything. There is a stretch in front of every new thing where you put in the most effort for the least return, and it lasts a lot longer than you expect. While you are in it there may be no evidence at all that it is working. That stretch is where most people quit. A handful of bad attempts starts to feel like an answer about you. Once you have an answer, walking away feels like good judgment. You decide you are not giving up on something hard. You are accepting a fact about yourself, which is a much easier thing to live with.

Some skills tell you how you are doing and some skills don’t. Shoot a free throw and the ball gives you the answer every time. Instant feedback, so you correct the next one. The hunt doesn’t work like that. You send the email and nothing comes back. Somebody goes quiet after two good conversations and you never learn whether it was your timing or a budget cut that made them go silent. The skills that give clean feedback are the ones people get good at fast. The skills that give you silence are the ones people give up on. Because when there’s no feedback, the only story available to explain it is the one about yourself.

That is what I was doing on those job boards. I had no information, so I made some up, and the version I made up was that I was not built for this.

I was a handful of tries in and reading it as a verdict. The late night searches went on for a couple of months.

The thing that eventually changed it was I stuck with it. I kept making the calls, I kept being bad at them. Eventually I was less bad, and after that it was just a thing I did. Two years later I won’t say I’m a pro. However, I stopped trying to be a “sales person” and decided to do it my way. Nowadays I have curious conversations with interesting people. Some of them go somewhere and some are just learning conversations.

You have a version of this. Something you tried, were genuinely bad at, and stopped doing. You never announced it. You just stopped putting yourself anywhere it would come up, and after a while you built the rest of your life around not having to do it.

Before you decide the thing is not for you, count. How many times have you actually done it? 

Before becoming the billionaire inventor behind the famous bagless vacuum cleaner, Sir James Dyson spent 15 years trying to get his design right. He built 5,126 failed prototypes, completely exhausting his savings. On attempt number 5,127, he finally created a functional model.

Are you 5,000 tries in? If the honest answer is less than a 1,000, you haven’t really started.

Practice is boring and not celebrated. Stay in it long enough and the thing you have been dreading turns into something you just do. Or maybe something you get famous for.

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh