The Day You See Yourself In The Mirror

🤓 Stranded Yacht...

No antics, no sales speak, no money-conscious post here. Nope. This is a journal piece and I don't give a s**t.

Because I've recently come to a very personal revelation about what might be holding me back. I'm sharing my experience in the hope that it might help somebody else in a similar situation.

Over the course of my 41 years, I've lived in 30 different houses, sometimes for a few months, sometimes for more than a year. That averages out to 1.6 moves per year. I currently live in Japan and have been here for six years now and I've only moved once, the longest stay in any one place in my entire life.

Why is this any interest to you?

Well, my great aspiration is to build a business that produces good for others, but I've encountered, over the last two years or so some serious obstacles in my way, the biggest of which is myself, my history, my hardwired, codified responses to challenges that come my way, and I've finally realized something very powerful.

For me, as with the majority of humanity, I didn't have a picture-perfect upbringing and have carried some wounds of youth into my adulthood. Those ancient emotional wounds still hold sway over my forward progress and consistently thwart my endeavor to make the world a better place.

As a father and as a son, I have an opinion about some of the ingredients for success in human development. There are certainly exceptions, plenty of them, of people who managed to screw up their otherwise healthy childhood with a series of devastating life experiences, but in general, what I'm about to say probably won't apply to those two-parent, stable family types who lived in only one or two locations, had a mom that took them to soccer practice and a grouchy, but loving dad who sat with the family at the dinner table at the end of the day.

As an only child who moved more than ten times between parents and almost into the system, as a person who saved his own hide in the last critical hour, I am realizing that I still carry a bevy of unhealthy coping and survival mechanisms from my youth.

It could explain why getting a successful online business rolling has been so difficult. I mean, it's not an easy feat, but still. I've been through a lot and I thought I could tame the lion of the internet more quickly than I was able to.

Part of the issue was that I was hiding myself, possibly because I may not have been aware of who I was, not as aware as I thought I was at least. I even used a series of pseudonyms when I started my online journey. I have only actually "come out" in the last six to eight months.

Having lived like a gyspy for so long, changing the scenery, disappearing and reappearing with a new identity was just another part of my survival shtick. Ironically, the internet has pinned me down and left more of a paper trail of my real self more than my actual life ever did. And in this realization, I saw my patterns of avoidance.

We Need Help Sometimes, Don't We

So for the last two years, I've tried a series of schemes to make money online in order to fund a social innovation web app. Imagine if I had just asked people for money from the beginning for this project?? I'm still not there yet, but I'm getting closer. The takeaway is for lonewolfs like me, we try to do everything ourselves and make ourselves perfect for the big debut. In my own situation, if I wasn't ready for the debut, I would just pick up and start somewhere fresh, the clean slate. But many of us solopreneurs and lone heroes (at least in our own minds) need to learn to reach out, open ourselves to others and share the victories and defeats.

So I'm taking a pass at it here. And look, I'm still a professional. I've laid some personal truth out and it takes nothing away from what I'm capable of doing for you on a professional level. It's just simple honesty.