“It’s never as scary or as hard as you thought”

I had breakfast with my buddy and great entrepreneur, Jason from Jackthreads yesterday.  I’ve written about Jason and his entrpreneurial path before, so I don’t need to rehash the story, but needless to say it’s been a lot of fun watching both he and Jackthreads grow over the last 3 years.  The last 4-6 months in particular have been very exciting. It’s a very fast growing company.  And as a result he’s been thrown in many situations that he never had to deal with before from large scale customer service to dealing with investors to negotiating offers to hiring and managing employees. As an entrepreneur I think it has always been his plan and hope to face situations like these because it meant things were and are going well, but it doesn’t make facing them any less scary.  So yesterday as we discussed the next big step for him, I asked how he felt about it.  He said “well just like everything else, we’ll just jump in and see what happens.  It’s never as scary or as hard as you thought.”

I’ve had many things in my life that I was scared to face as I know everyone does.  As an entrepreneur there have been plenty of things I just didn’t want to deal with, and honestly wasn’t really even sure I could deal with. But truthfully in every situation I feared  but ultimately faced, I have to say Jason is exactly right.  It’s never as scary or as hard as you thought.  Or as another friend likes to say “the monster under the bed is never as scary as we expected,” and most of the time it’s not even there.  It’s seem like fear (and what it does to us) is the only thing we need to fear after all. (yes a reference to FDR there)