You know what I remember most about law school? The legal textbooks recounting the most complicated fact patterns on earth. A case would start off with a parent and child going into a department store to buy a vacuum cleaner. But, it would end with the child going into anaphylactic shock because she ate a sandwich in a locked employee break room. Guess what I got the last time I shopped for a vacuum cleaner? Yup, just a vacuum.
Everything that could go wrong did go wrong in those fact patterns. So those scenarios were great teaching tools for legal concepts. The cases taught you how to identify and manage risks for your client. They also instructed you on how to prepare for any legal challenge that might come your way.
While the ability to protect your client against potential problems is a great lawyerly skill, seeking out potential hazards at every turn can have a negative effect on a lawyer’s personal life. No matter the decision to be made, lawyers end up analyzing it down to the smallest detail. So much so that things like picking a restaurant for dinner become an hours-long process involving spreadsheets, scoring systems, and Yelp reviews.
We rationalize our risk averse nature because we believe that it helps us make the exact right decision, one that minimizes all potential hazards, every time. The problem with applying this strategy to our own lives is that some of the best decisions in life are the riskiest and have the highest probability that things won’t turn out as planned. Decisions like entering a relationship, getting married, having children, and venturing out into something entrepreneurial.
Entrepreneurship is pretty much synonymous with risk. To become an entrepreneur initially, you give up the comforts of steady cash flow, steady work and colleagues all in the hopes that you will become wildly successful down the road. It can be daunting stuff because there is no way to guarantee success. You could pour your heart, soul, and cash into a venture, and it could fail anyway. Or you can put all of the money in your 401K toward flipping a luxury home and become a millionaire in the first year. Both of those entrepreneurial endings are possible, and there are no yelp reviews to predict that.
You decide that you are going to make that shift first.
When it comes to the big questions like leaving a job and starting a business, most people set about the decision making process in the incorrect order. They research, analyze every pitfall, and create elaborate plans that they will execute at some point in the future when fate smacks them in the face with an entrepreneurial offer they can’t refuse.
If they want to open a bed and breakfast in another country, they say things like, “I’m going to visit country x for vacation and research the real estate opportunities to see what I find.” Then they go to country x for 5 days, see a few properties and declare that now is not the right time because of a conversation they had with their cab driver. If they want to become a business consultant in a specialized industry, they like to, “put some feelers out there and see what comes back.”
Those approaches feel like decisions because there is action. Unfortunately, those actions usually don’t lead to taking the entrepreneurial leap they were hoping to make. They just lead to more planning and researching. Meanwhile year after year they remain in the same job.
To decide to do something big – leave your job and start a business – you must decide with unwavering certainty to do it first. This means you visualize what you want in great detail. You write the vision with budget estimates, cost projections, revenue goals, etc. to make the picture crystal clear. Then you review your vision and decide that it will come to pass no matter what.
This is not “making it happen” in the traditional sense. There are so many forces, big breaks, and unexpected turns that must occur but are beyond our control that truly “make things happen” in our lives. So the “making it happen” we control is the one where we act as if our future vision is the current reality of our present life.
If the decision is leaving a job and becoming an entrepreneur, this means writing your resignation letter, choosing a date to turn it in, saving cash, and acting now to replace your income by marketing and selling your services. It also means implementing (not researching) a plan to handle all the other areas of your life like health insurance and child care. You set your mind to believe that your decision is happening now as in you will not have a job to go to tomorrow. Then once the decision is set, you take action from there. You’d be surprised how much you accomplish once you convince yourself that you can no longer rely on your paycheck because you won’t have one soon.
As the old saying goes, leap and a net shall appear. It’s not the other way around. The net never rises to meet you on the edge of the cliff first. That wouldn’t require a contribution from you, and the net of life doesn’t exist without your input.
The jump, the decision, must come first. Then, all the great stuff happens after that. So much so that once you get down to the net, and it bounces toward adventures that were beyond your vision in the first place, you’ll wonder what took you so long to leave that cliff.
Have you decided to take a leap with a big life decision? How did you do it? How does it feel now that you’ve done it? Let me know in the comments. I’d love to hear your thoughts.
I love your writing voice
