Two years ago, I was laid off from my job.
The company I worked for had been acquired, and the new management decided to fire 22 members of our marketing team.
Overnight, my income vanished.
Just a few weeks earlier, I had started building my own consultancy.
The plan was to offer my own growth marketing services to enterprise SaaS companies, but at the time of my layoff I hadn’t made a single dollar from it yet.
I was forced to make a decision: find another job or go all in on my business.
Against the advice of friends, family, and colleagues, I decided to risk it and work full-time on my own business.
I’d really like to tell you that my business blew up into an overnight success - but it didn’t. Even with a marketing background it seemed impossible to land my first client.
Weeks went by, grinding day and night on my project for nothing in return. My credit card started to rack up charges as I desperately held on to my savings.
On paper, I should’ve quit.
But the thought of returning to work at some boring company, spending a third of my life working some dull job while I spend another third asleep weighed down on me with a crushing force.
It was a life I was determined not to go back to - ever.
After about 5 months, which felt more like 12, I finally turned that side project into a business.
And while it wasn’t anything spectacular, it paid the bills and allowed me to earn a living by working on my own projects.
So what changed? How did we get here from the darkness and despair of the first few weeks?
I went all in.
And I don’t mean physically, like deciding to work on the project full time, but rather, I went all in mentally.
By fully committing to building my business.
By investing in my own skill set.
By going out of my way to meet new people.
By getting out of my comfort zone and reaching out to potential clients.
By getting comfortable being told “no”.
By learning from failure instead of collapsing into it.
By relentlessly pursuing my dream against the odds.
I’m writing to you now, not to convince you to quit your job today, but to convince you to fully commit to your project.
Commit to such a degree that you’ll work three times more than you do in your job.
Commit to such a degree that failure, or better yet the fear of failure, cannot stop you.
Commit to such a degree that there’s no going back.
Go all in and fight for it.
I’ll leave you with these words from H. Jackson Brown:
"In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins — not through strength, but by perseverance."
Cheers,
Avery
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