87% Difficult

I spent the better part of this afternoon working through the blog archives and reviewing the story of PJP.  It seems that lately, 87% of entrepreneurship has been an uphill struggle...except when I review over 500 blog posts from the past two years, I'm reminded that there is nothing new about feeling that way.  NOTHING AT ALL.  It is a common theme in our history and regardless of how much we grow or undertake new ventures in the future, without question it is totally going to feel like an 87% uphill battle.  History does repeat itself, indeed.  (Also, we are both difficult and are wary of anything that feels too easy.  We prefer to wrestle to the ground with any decisions we make and that alone likely contributes to at least 41% of the battle we wage above and beyond the average person.) But I was also looking through our archive with the underlying theme of starting to put our story together into an outline format.  Have we learned anything in the past two years that makes a cohesive story that is interesting and informational to someone with entrepreneurial goals?  Or have we spun around in circles and are really only inches from where we started in the fall of 2013?  Being so deep in the story means that sometimes, I can't see the forest for the trees.  I needed our written story to give some perspective.

And thankfully for all of us, I'm pretty sure we've learned a few things in the last 27 months.  The obvious things, like staying up all night is hard and everything costs at least 10 times what we think it will are an easy given.  But the not so obvious as well, like changing your life completely is insanely difficult and insanely rewarding.  Perspective is good for that sort of observation.

So I marked 10 posts that meant to something to me...something that marked our progress forward, whether it was working faster or working smarter or maturing in a way that felt small at the time but now in retrospect, WAS HUGE.  And I put them all together to start a story that proves this all is just a two steps forward and one step back journey.

I'm not sure what I'll do with the story when it is finished.  Or maybe it never will finish, because if we are doing this all correctly, this time next year should prove that we are different people with different goals than today.  Or at least, I would think so...right?

Or maybe it will become a book and I'll give it a catchy title like "Always Running Out of Freaking Boxes and Other Misadventures from Early Entrepreneurship..." and we will self publish for the tens of people interested in reading it.  I suppose that could happen too.

Or maybe I'll just remember that history promises that entrepreneurship is 87% difficult at least 95% of the time...