taking a leap

When Britt and I decided to be business partners, we didn’t really know one another. We had been working together for a couple of years, but we weren’t friends yet, we hadn’t spent any time together dreaming up our business - we simply saw something in one another that led us each to believe that we could build something together.

Now, looking back, I think that thing that we saw, or instinctively understood about one another is that neither of us was afraid to try. We knew somehow that the only way to see if we could make a business work, was to really try it out, and to give it a fair shot.

And by give it a fair shot, I mean that we were 100% all in on a business that didn’t even exist yet from the moment we decided to do it. We invested (a lot) of time and money. We committed to working hours before there was any work to do. We held each other accountable, and held ourselves accountable to one another before the stakes got too high.

Since we launched our second company, Mavinhouse, and now we have a team of other people along for the ride with us, I have said to each of them at one point - the hardest thing to understand about being an entrepreneur is that the time to take the leap is before you’re ready.

I don’t have a very professional way of explaining it, so I’ll say this: there’s some kind of universal magic that only allows the idea that you’re launching to really work when you actually believe in it. 

Believe in it enough that the world around you knows that this is going to work.

Know that there is no other way - this is your life now.

That moment might come for you as soon as you have the idea for the business, or it might come after years of dipping your toe in and building the confidence to know you can do it, but either way, it will only be ‘a thing’ when you make it THE thing.

Britt and I will keep building things, because we love the trying. We are curious about the things that we can make work, and we are willing to change everything for the right idea. We leap before we are fully ready just about 100% of the time.

Are you a toe dipper or a leap taker?