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

Sunday has never been one of my favorite times. Once I get past breakfast, the dread of Monday permeates the whole rest of the day. And most of those hours end up consumed by dreary chores that have to be done so I can start the week organized: cleaning, laundry, paperwork, mending, ironing, bill-paying (the worst). I seldom have any actual fun on Sundays.

But I really topped myself for eye-glazing tedium yesterday - I had to spend hours online trying to figure out proper shipping charges for the items in The Geniocity Shop. I would have had a more rollicking evening poking dead gnats out of the tiny squares in the window screens with a pin.

I’ve had a lot of Sundays – and Saturdays and nights and holidays – like that since I decided to start Geniocity.com. I thought I saw it coming, but I’ve always been nearsighted: What looked like a few hills from afar were actually K2-sized piles of minutiae that I’ve had to identify, extract and analyze since committing to this project. At this point, two years of suffering later, the merest word from anyone about needing me to come up with numerical calculations or comprehensive rates or profitability projections acts like an instant karate-chop on my will to live, dropping it to the floor catatonic, with its thumb in its mouth.

But in the business world, catatonia doesn’t count as an excused absence.  I’ve had to physically drag myself to my desk like a briefcase full of lead, unsure whether I was more terrified of trying some humongous, math-related task or of not trying it and dooming my project to a shriveling, contemptible death.

The most awful chore jumped my partner and me (not now, Kato!) about a year ago: We had to create cash-flow spreadsheets showing all our anticipated expenses and income for three years. Three years. Even with the proper forms and some tips provided by our kindly business advisor, we honestly thought we’d die. It took weeks of agonized labor with calculators and a laptop, marked by emergency coffee breaks and deep breathing, to get us through it. We probably could have used some portable defibrillator paddles.

I exaggerate only slightly. Making myself deal with this stuff has been not unlike facing down writer’s block. In fact – and even though my being a word person is why I suffer these numerical meltdowns – business has more in common with being a journalist than you might think. 

Just as I do as a reporter, I the Entrepreneur have to find things out. And I have to make sure those things are accurate. It takes a lot of checking out information sources, from phoning people and asking questions to hunting up written stuff online and in print, to learn what I need to know. And also like a reporter, I can’t allow myself the luxury of failing to produce on time.

See, journalists can’t afford writer’s block – those stories have to be written come hellfire or power blackout. You miss deadline or get beat on a story, you’re toast. Entrepreneurs, alas, can’t afford to skip figuring out where every dollar is going to come from or go. Not even if that makes you wish you were one of the dead gnats in your own window screen.