The other day I was driving to Palo Alto to a cool new meet up event called Enteresting and noticed something I always noticed but never fully absorbed. I was on a two laned highway with far too many stop lights; and noticed that although there were two lanes, much of the time only one lane was being filled. I caught myself thinking, “why isn’t anyone going into that lane? It’s wide open, there must be something wrong with it. I might as well just be safe and wait here with the other 15 cars and sit looking at break lights.” I witnessed myself going into the, what I call “collective comfort zone” . A state in which people may do something (or nothing for that matter) because everyone else is doing it. In this case it’s looking at break lights while I could be moving to the front. So what did I do? I slowly steered my car to the right lane making my self the only driver in the lane. I said to myself, “why didn’t I do that earlier?”.
This is much like the dilemma of Generation-Y, we all have a yearning to move forward and experience something different from what our notion of conventional is. However, even with an obvious climb in entrepreneurship with many leveraging the second generation of the internet, there are still many people Gen-Yers that remain stagnant in a place they don’t want to be. There are many reasons why someone would not pursue something that excites them, such as: not having money, not understanding the field fully, legal constraints, not having the right team, not having a technical background, so on and so forth. These reason for not jumping into entrepreneurship are more like excuses then anything else. They are responses to a person’s fear of uncertainty. And believe me that fear can be overwhelming, keeping a person in a cube for years. I believe there is only one way to truly combat that fear, and that is to take action. By no means will this cure your entrepreneurial anxieties or strike you with a stroke of genius, but it a necessary step in moving forward. It’s not only a step but it’s a perpetual state you must be committed to remaining in.
In my case, when it came to developing the concept for BlackTop Hoops I knew it was always going to be ONLY a concept if I didn’t jump in the deep end with my blind fold on. The entire Forrester Research team couldn’t prepare me for the venture was taking, and even in my thoroughly naive state I knew that. So what did I do? I sought out the most knowledgeable development team I could find and invested some of my hard earned money in spec’ing the website out and using them to help me iron out my concept. Worth it?….ask me in 6 months. Regardless, it made me fully vested in my own success, I took action and didn’t look back. Although the project is still not fully off the ground, I have had some of the most rewarding experiences of my life building this from the ground up, and nothing more and nothing less than taking action got me here.
Moral of the story: when a lane is open it might be in your best interest to take it. The fear that there may be something wrong ahead is always going to be there to some degree…but believe me, you will never reap the benefits of the open road if you don’t take action.
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