Start With Why

American Dream, and I was living it. My whole feeling of self-worth came from the fact that I did it, I took the plunge, and it felt amazing. If anyone ever asked me what I did, I would pose like George Reeves from the old Superman TV series. I would put my hands on my hips, stick out my chest, stand at an angle and with my head raised high I’d declare, “I am an entrepreneur.” What I did was how I defined myself, and it felt good. I wasn’t like Superman, I was Superman.
    As anyone who starts a business knows, it is a fantastic race. There is a statistic that hangs over your head—over 90 percent of all new businesses fail in the first three years. For anyone with even a bit of a competitive spirit in them, especially for someone who defines himself or herself as an entrepreneur (hands on hips, chest out, standing at a slight angle), these overwhelming odds of failure are not intimidating, they only add fuel to the fire. The foolishness of thinking that you’re a part of the small minority of those who actually will make it past three years and defy the odds is part of what makes entrepreneurs who they are, driven by passion and completely irrational.
    After year one, we celebrated. We hadn’t gone out of business. We were beating the odds. We were living the dream. Two years passed. Then three years. I’m still not sure how we did it—we never properly implemented any good systems and processes. But to heck with it, we’d beaten the odds. I had achieved my goal and that’s all that mattered. I was now a proud member of a very small group of people who could say, with statistical proof, that I was an American small business owner.
    The fourth year would prove to be very different. The novelty of being an entrepreneur had worn off. I no longer stood like George Reeves. When asked what I did, I would now tell people that I did “positioning and strategy consulting.” It was much less exciting and it certainly didn’t feel like a big race anymore. It was no longer a passionate pursuit, it was just a business. And the reality was that the business did not look that rosy.
    We were never a runaway success. We made a living, but not much more. We had some FORTUNE 500 clients and we did good work. I was crystal clear on what we did. And I could tell you how we were different—how we did it. Like everyone else in the game, I would try to convince prospective clients how we did it, how we were better, how our way was unique . . . and it was hard work. The truth is, we beat the odds because of my energy, not because of my business acumen, but I didn’t have the energy to sustain that strategy for the rest of my life. I was aware enough to know that we needed better systems and processes if the business was to sustain itself.
    I was incredibly demoralized. Intellectually, I could tell you what I needed to do, I just couldn’t do it. By September 2005 I was the closest I’ve ever been to, if I wasn’t already, completely depressed. My whole life I’d been a pretty happy-go-lucky guy, so just being unhappy was bad enough. But this was worse.
    The depression made me paranoid. I was convinced I was going to go out of business. I was convinced I was going to be evicted from my apartment. I was certain anyone who worked for me didn’t like me and that my clients knew I was a fraud. I thought everyone I met was smarter than me. I thought everyone I met was better than me. Any energy I had left to sustain the business now went into propping myself up and pretending that I was doing well.
    If things were to change, I knew I needed to learn to implement more structure before everything crashed. I attended conferences, read books and asked successful friends for advice on how to do it. It was all good advice, but I couldn’t hear it. No matter what I was told, all I could hear was that I was doing everything wrong. Trying to fix the problem didn’t make me feel better, it made me feel worse. I felt more helpless. I started having desperate thoughts, thoughts that for an entrepreneur are almost worse than suicide: I thought about getting a job. Anything. Anything that would stop the feeling of falling I had almost every day.
    I remember visiting the family of my future brother-in-law for Thanksgiving that year. I sat on the couch in the living room of his mother’s house, people were talking to me, but I never heard a word. If I was asked questions, I replied only in platitudes. I didn’t really desire or even