Barely Readable

I look at the line graph of my savings account and wonder if I have it flipped upside down.

Nope, that doesn’t look right either.

I can feel the panic rise up in my chest. My head feels heavier; my vision goes all fuzzy. I’m blanketed in sheer terror. This is not the chart my parents had in mind when they sent me to cartography school.

It’s not all terror and panic, though, there’s also self-doubt.

Self-doubt, the soothsayer in the back of my mind who predicts terrible things in my future. Server meltdowns. PR disasters. Relationships at the breaking point. Meetings.

Giant man-eating sloths.

Okay, so there are some good moments, too… short and immediately before all the terrible ones. A fresh idea will come and it’ll juice me up. You know what I’m talking about… it’s invigorating. You feel like you’ve thought of something first. And maybe you have, but more than likely you’ll be coming down from that high when you do your first Google search. I know I do.

Like a guy whose inexplicably intelligent and super-model-gorgeous girlfriend cheated on him and now finds himself dateless for the social, I scrounge around in the nether regions of my ideas black book. Could a car-security-device-(think:-Club)-and-ice-scraper combo work? What about that social network for the antisocial? Damn, even that concept has its own bubble.

All the failure adds up. And the mathematics is done in megatons. I crawl along the carpet of my apartment, eyes watering, eating the crumbs I catch as I slither by. I’m so tired and I feel like giving up. I just want to sleep for a long while, securely tucked under the covers.

But wait, there is a tiny ray of hope: those inspiring but absurd articles about how you can do it. How you, yes you, can live the dream. Read that stuff and stay away from the buzz-killing, serious, and cynical.

Read Paul Graham’s catalog for the nth time. Read a chapter from Founders at Work before bed. Read Guy Kawasaki. (I’m sure you have other favorites.) These guys may be loopy, but that’s precisely the poison you need.

Epilogue
So this is what I signed up for. And I hope you’ll put your name on the dotted line too. This is our promise and our battle cry: we’re going to hop on our savings accounts and ride them speedily into the ground.

Take my advice: quit your job. It’s quite liberating, but in a good way.

Let me explain: I recently took one of those voluntary severance packages that businesses offer when the reign of merger terror is just beginning. If you take such a package, you will be one of the few sane people at your company, but ironically the first on the chopping block.

(The cynics among us say this is just business as usual.)

So now I’m in a startup. My company constructs walls of a businesslike appearance for me to hide behind while sleeping in until noon and learning Rails. It’s exactly the work my parents had in mind when they sent me to law school.

Some observations from a new entrepreneur about working for yourself:

• You can work when you want, which probably means never.
• You can grow a beard.
• You can pick your nose.
• You don’t get Veterans’ Day off, but that’s just because every day is a holiday.
• You can run errands when nobody else does.
• Your cat will want to play a whole lot more, but this also turns out to be the solution to his weight problem.
• Your weight problem, however, is just beginning. See next point.
• Your only coworker is your fridge, and it’s the type of coworker who’s always bringing treats into the office.

Next week: the isolation, self-doubt, and perpetual terror.