The Weight of Being The First

A couple of weeks ago, I went to a networking event and ran into some of my enterprise friends. It had been a while since I'd spent an evening with people from the corporate side, so it felt a little like a reunion.

We were catching up, and one of them mentioned an upcoming restructuring at their company. I could hear the worry in their voice. Somehow the conversation turned to my business. They looked at me and said, "I could never do that. I don't know how you're making it work."

I've heard some version of this sentence many times since starting my business. I'm coming up on over two years running my own company, and it keeps showing up. People can't believe I'm doing it. They’re in awe. They call it a big risk. Then they tell me they could never.

I take it as a compliment, because it is one. When someone tells you they could never do what you’re doing, they’re telling you they see what it takes. That means something, especially coming from people who know how demanding corporate life is.

What I notice is the picture that usually comes with it. They imagine someone fearless, someone who saw the cliff and jumped. I understand why. From the outside, that’s what it looks like.

Something else struck me that night. The person who said they could never do it was the one with a restructure looming over their head. I know that feeling well. I was planning my own exit, carefully and on my own timeline, when I got laid off. The safe option had risk in it the whole time. It just didn't feel that way from the inside.

So I told them the truth. "It may look like I'm thriving, but there are good days and bad days. The key is planning for the ebbs and flows." Then I shared what I've come to believe most about this chapter. "Working for yourself isn't easier. Working for a company isn't easier. It's just different."

What I didn't say was the part I've been thinking about since: the weight of being the first.

When you're the first in your circle to step out and do something different, most people will measure your decision against the life they know. That's natural. The catch is that their read starts to stick when it's the only one you hear. Hear "big risk" often enough and the phrase follows you around. On a good week you can shrug it off. On a slow week it sounds like a prediction.

Someone can celebrate your wings without understanding what it took to grow them.

I think that's what was happening that night. My friends were genuinely supportive, but they were seeing my decision through the world they knew. You can explain the ebbs and flows as clearly as you like, and someone who hasn't lived them will still hear risk. And that's understandable. There are experiences in their lives I wouldn't fully understand either.

This goes beyond starting a business. It's the first one in the family to move across the country and build a life where nobody knows their name. It's the leader promoted over the peers they used to vent with, who now has nowhere to vent.

Every butterfly needs something to hold it while it changes. Mine is a small group of people who have stepped out of their own circles too. We meet often to talk, celebrate and keep each other sane. I never have to explain the ebbs and flows to them. They're living them too.

One of them reminds me of the same thing almost every time we talk. "Where you start is not where you end up." I need to hear it more than I'd like to admit, because I still catch myself thinking like an enterprise leader when the moment calls for a scrappy business owner.

That line applies to anyone doing something the people around them haven't done before. Where you start is not where you end up, and the people who have already gone first can usually see that about you before you can.

So who’s holding you while you change?

Hit reply and tell me about it. 

Until next Tuesday.
Ceaneh