Feels Just Like Starting Over

The false security of the known can be far more limiting than the uncertainty of starting over.

In July of 2020, I resigned as president of PromoCorner and started brandivate.

Looking back more than six years later, it would be incredibly easy to clean that story up a bit. I could tell you I had an unshakable belief in myself, a crystal-clear vision for what brandivate would become, and the confidence to bet everything on my ability to make it happen.

That would also be complete bullshit. To be completely candid, I was petrified.

Yes, I was unhappy at PromoCorner, but unhappiness wasn't really why I left. I'd been unhappy in jobs before and managed to convince myself to stay. After all, staying was comfortable and easy: there was a paycheck, a title, some degree of certainty, and all the other things we accumulate during a career that make walking away increasingly difficult.

What finally changed wasn't my level of confidence. The change was that I became tired of spending my life being afraid to start over.

There's something particularly intimidating about beginning again after you've been doing something for a long time. By that point in my career, I'd spent more than two decades in the promotional products industry. I had relationships, experience, credibility, and a pretty good understanding of where I fit, and starting brandivate meant voluntarily becoming a beginner again.

Suddenly there was no company behind me, no guaranteed paycheck arriving every week, and nobody else responsible for figuring out what happened next. There was just me and my business partner at the time, an idea, and a frightening amount of uncertainty. In other words, I didn't have some oversized belief that everything would work out.

Honestly, I think we romanticize moments like these after the fact. Once someone starts a successful company, changes careers, moves across the country, or makes some other significant life change, we tend to rewrite the beginning as an act of incredible courage. We assume they must have known something the rest of us didn't.

I certainly didn't. I didn't know whether brandivate would be wildly successful or crash and burn like Evel Knievel trying to jump the fountains at Caesar's Palace in 1967. If I'm being completely candid, I didn't know exactly what it would become. Hell, there were days when I wasn't entirely sure what I was doing.

What I finally understood was that I didn't need certainty to make the decision. More importantly, I didn't need to stop being afraid; I just needed to stop letting fear decide for me.

There's an important difference between those two things. Courage isn't the absence of fear, and starting over doesn't mean everything that came before was wasted. We carry those experiences, relationships, mistakes, lessons, and scars with us. Starting over isn't really starting from zero so much as choosing a different direction with everything we've learned along the way.

Six years later, I'm profoundly grateful I made that choice, but not for the reasons you might think. It's not because everything worked perfectly or as I visualized it (spoiler alert: it didn't) or because starting brandivate proved that I was right to bet on myself. I'm grateful because I finally stopped allowing the fear of what might happen next to keep me somewhere I no longer wanted to be.

Regardless of your station in life, there will always be compelling reasons not to begin again: too old, too firmly established, have too much to lose, the timing isn't right, or we don't have everything figured out. The truth is, all of those reasons represent nothing but the false security of the known.

Looking back, starting over was every bit as scary as I imagined. I just finally decided that fear wasn’t a good enough reason to stay where I was.