I came across this blog post yesterday which felt like a bit of a wake-up call.

Especially, this excerpt:

2018 felt like my breakout year. I took massive risks, built a new business off the ground, quit my job, launched some huge projects like the 24 Hour Startup.

But 2019 didn't feel like that.

It felt a bit like I crawled into a hole and hid away. I picked a new product to work on and didn't talk much. I didn't tweet much. I didn't put myself out there as much.

I think this is partly due to fear of what people thought about me.

I'm not regretting it, but I think my success shocked me a bit. It made me feel like I needed to keep "one-upping" myself.

This is not necessarily a bad thing - the new project I was working on was the antithesis of this mentality. It is a project that takes time, and there will be no breakout success. So, going heads down is essential sometimes, all creators do it. 2019 was about working hard and not talking much.

I'm really hard on myself. Because I'm so focused on building Pigeon, I tend to forget about my success and all of the things I've done in the last couple years.

When people ask about how things are going, lately, my answers are something along the lines of "good, not great". But the reality is that things are going great if you compared them to 1 year ago.

It's just that the novelty has worn off that "I started my own profitable business, live my own life on my own terms, and make almost $100k/year doing it." I don't even want to tell anyone anymore that.

It's never enough - sure that is a good poisition to be in right now - but will it be there next year? Could it all fall apart? Yes, that's why I need to focus on bigger to make up for that. I don't want to "do OK for myself" but have to go back to the corporate world in 10 years. I work so fucking hard right now so I don't have to work ever again past 40 years old.

All I care about is the success of my new project, and I won't be happy until I can tell people that it's successful.

The issue is that the "success" of Pigeon has taken longer than expected, and may take another 1-2 years. I can't sit in silence that long. I think about how I'll finally "come out and tell the world" when I hit $5k or $10k/month, but that might be a really long time, and I need to figure out a way to put myself out there while I work on that.

Because the reality is that putting myself out there is the best thing I can do, both for myself or my business.

I need to remember that nobody actually gives a fuck. I have this impostor's syndrome that my Twitter following will see me as a fraud, because I couldn't be successful with my new project as fast as the next wildly successful SaaS founder.

I need to be comfortable with losing it all. With losing all my "cred".

From the article:

Will write about this more. I think there is an easy solution to conquering this, just need to think about it a bit more.