Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

It’s been a couple of fine days.

And here’s the truth: I’ve actually had lots of them since I decided to quit my wage-slave job and build something of my own.

I overlook them all too often, dragged as I frequently am to the murky bottom of the ol’ emotional pond by the many bewildering subjects I have to master and the obstacles I need to overcome. It can be all too easy to let my outlook get scummed over by weariness and the sensation of being all alone with my large and scary responsibilities.

But even my worst days as an entrepreneur have never been as bad as the lows I’ve suffered as someone else’s helpless hireling – and the good ones are good in a more satisfying way.

Take Wednesday. I had a ton of free-lance work to get done and spent hours conducting interviews with sources. But in the middle of the day, I got to meet with an interesting person I’d never met before, a professor, to talk about my new business and his area of expertise. I didn’t have to take notes and I wasn’t on deadline – I could just listen to this man, find out who he was and enjoy a conversation about the creative and informative aspects our work that gave us common ground.

That would have been fun enough. But the best part was hearing him agree to blog for Geniocity.com about his field (you’ll hear more about this soon). It felt like a coup and a significant step for us to have this expert join our project – and I was free to make my own decision about it. No boss loomed over my desk, poised to fault me and spoil my efforts. The omnipresent dread of having to defend or justify or gut or adulterate my own work to accommodate a supervisor’s whims or cowardly conformity was gone.

Similar thing yesterday – I met with a marketing person at one of my favorite coffee shops. We had never seen each other before, but the more we discussed our work,  the more exciting connections and possibilities we discovered. The conversation continued for an hour. No one was waiting back at the office to disapprove of my taking so long, or to tell me I couldn’t explore working with this person, or to dismiss the ideas I’d returned with.

I left that meeting energized and hopeful. And I got to stay that way.

I think that’s reason enough to start my own business.