When I first started my entrepreneurship journey, I juggled a full-time job, Toastmasters, TEDx, and all the volunteering I do in between. Mid-year, I decided I would forego my safety net and leave a job which paid me 3 times more (even to this date) to work full time on Curative. I was on a mission to make it cash-flow positive in between learning what entrepreneurship actually means.
It’s not as easy or as pretty as these FB/Instagram quotes say – I made tons of mistakes, I trusted the wrong people, made decisions as the situations arose, had high expectations. I realized what things I never should be involved in and what my personal barriers are. In between, all of this some told me I would never make it – that I would never make sense of the work I was doing. At first, I was extremely hurt cause I couldn’t understand how people who had started just the same as I did, made mistakes, and was still human couldn’t understand that I had just started unlearning and learning all over again. It made me wonder if I should go back to the safety net – the stable 9-5 job with the good pay and the insurance package and whatever else that comes with it.
I decided to stop listening to the naysayers and hold friends who would kill me for screwing up but would also tell me how I need to look at the problem in a new light. I had to learn fast that the empathetic side doesn’t work in business relationships. Today, I may not be anywhere near entrepreneur of the year – but our team has gone through starting an event company just before easter bombs and is managing through a global pandemic that hit the event industry full fold. We ventured into new verticals from packaging, branding, content creation and so much more.
If you ever do start your own thing – remember no entrepreneur in the history of mankind – knows absolutely everything from the get-go. Asking for help and advice from people of experience is not a bad thing – just make sure its someone you can trust. You will definitely screw up. You may be successful, you may have to cut your losses, you may pivot to something completely different but if you are driven enough you will stay on it
"If it wasn’t for constant disapproval and rejection, I wouldn’t have found my own voice and I wouldn’t have found the courage and the strength to fight their voices and follow my own. Thank you for giving up on me so easily, you taught me how to fight for myself."