1640: When You're Ready to Throw in the Towel by Margo Aaron of That Seems Important on Entrepreneurship

[00:00:00] This is Optimal Work Daily, When Youre Ready to Throw in the Towel by Margo Aaron of ThatSeemsImportant.com. My fiancé was laughing at me. I had just declared my foray into entrepreneurialism a bust and he was laughing. Who says throwing in the towel anyway? I do. You're not throwing in the towel. Yes, I am. I am not cut out for this. I was wrong. This was stupid. It's over.

[00:00:28] Laughing. He was laughing because this was about the 17th time this month I was throwing in the towel. I have a drawl when I'm self-pitying. Because the part they don't tell you about building a business is that you're forced to come face-to-face with your inadequacies every single day. Maybe you're not a design person or you're not great at writing or you hate how you look on camera. Whatever your Achilles heel, your business will punch you in the face with it. So it makes sense that your natural reaction is to be scared out of your mind and assume the worst.

[00:00:58] In psychology, they call it catastrophizing. It's when all you can see and feel is the negative outcome. And that outcome in your mind isn't just any negative outcome. It's a friggin' catastrophe. Catastrophizing. The earth will crumble. You will wake up tomorrow and the sun will not rise. Or worse, everyone will hate you and think your website is stupid and ugly and they'll laugh at you behind your back. Just like that girl you know who started a blog but the blog sucks. You're going to be sucky blog girl.

[00:01:27] Yeah, it's not rational and it makes no sense when you read it or when you make the mistake of sharing this logic with your spouse. But it's how you feel. It's how all of us feel when we're starting out. When you are doing the real work of building something bigger than yourself, s*** gets real and painful and it sucks. I really wanted to write this with four action steps to get you out of the horrible spiraling into self-doubt phase.

[00:01:50] But everything was trite. And that's because the solution isn't as simple as go for a run or stop overthinking or just do you. The problem has to do with this very particular breed of fear. This fear is like a neurotoxin. It gets in your brain and makes you go, I can't do this. I'm not cut out for this. I have no idea what I am doing. And then it paralyzes you so you can't do anything because you're too busy affirming all of the ways you suck over and over again in your mind.

[00:02:19] While I don't have four simple solutions as to what to do, I can tell you why this happens. It's the Fundamental Attribution Error or FAE. The FAE says that we attribute people's behavior to who they are rather than the situation they are in. For example, let's say Ralph takes a test and he fails. His teacher commits an FAE if he determines that Ralph is probably stupid and not that the test was bad or difficult or maybe Ralph was hungover.

[00:02:48] There are many reasons besides being stupid that Ralph might have failed, but the teacher can't see them. The teacher has made an FAE. When it comes to your business, you're committing an FAE on yourself. You're assuming you're the one who isn't cut out for this when really it's the situation. The FAE makes your brain tell you the reason your competitors have 6,000 followers and you have 157 is because, and I quote, You're an idiot. Go home.

[00:03:14] You have no idea what you're doing and you will get chlamydia and you will die. See the problem? Your brain is lying. It's wrong. And like your friend who won't leave her boyfriend who treats her poorly, is only seeing what it wants to see because it's scared. All too often, we believe the stories our brain tells us about how sucky we are because we are also scared and it seems to make sense when we are in it. We believe that we are doomed to fail because of our faulty makeup. Technical term, disposition.

[00:03:44] The nice thing about brain fails, like FAE, is that as soon as you become aware of them, they lose their power. When you catch yourself catastrophizing, see if you can call bulls**t on your brain. Like this. Hey, brain. I know you're my brain controlling all these important things, but right now, you're being a jerk. Obviously, I don't know what I'm doing, but that doesn't mean I'm not cut out for this. So, thanks for your vote of confidence. I'm just getting started and this is how business works. You test things out. You try things.

[00:04:13] You look stupid a few times until you work out all the kinks. That's the game. It's hard. And this thing you're catastrophizing over is one of those hard things that there's a learning curve for and you need to let me get there. So, chill the F out for two seconds, please. Cut me some slack and let me get good at this. Sincerely, Margo. And then, don't throw in the towel. Take the towel and fold it nicely and put it back on the shelf.

[00:04:42] You just listened to the post titled, When You're Ready to Throw in the Towel by Margo Aaron of ThatSeemsImportant.com And thank you to Margo for letting us share her post today. In her quest to answer the question, how do you get people to care? And not finding the answers in her job, Margo set about learning all she could about persuasion, influence, direct response, copywriting, branding, and other buzzwords. And she eventually started her own business.

[00:05:09] And while she was making money, she still wasn't getting people to actually care. So, she started writing about her experiences and gained quite a following in the process. Today, Margo is the co-host of the popular internet talk show, Hillary and Margo Yell at Websites. And her website, That Seems Important, was named one of the top 100 websites for writers. So, come check it out at ThatSeemsImportant.com And I have that linked in this episode's description for you. But with that, I'm going to say goodbye for today. Hope you are having a great one. And thanks so much for being here.

[00:05:39] And I'll see you back here over the weekend, where your optimal life awaits.