I came across a Tim Ferriss video recently - I think it was a TED Talk - where he talks about addressing fears rather than setting goals.

What’s your biggest fear? It can be specific to a goal.

If your goal is to start a business, what’s stopping you? What’s your biggest fear? Is it failing and everyone laughing at you? Or failing and not being able to put food on the table?

Rather than worry about those things or worry about the unknown, we can just write that stuff down and come up with a plan.

And lately, the Coronavirus has me worried. It sucks to have finally started a business and it feels like a recession is about to hit… "Why couldn’t I have started 10 years ago when you could make millions off of a simple CRUD app?" 

^ A thought I often have. Coulda shoulda woulda...

 If the economy goes into the shitter, it will affect my businesses, possibly for several years, so let’s talk about the worst-case scenarios and how I can plan for these:

Luckily, I have some liquid investments, but a lot of it is in the stock market. So I need to wait some of those out and I will not be pulling my money out.

But a really bad scenario is this: the economy is so bad that I lose my sponsor for Starter Story and I lose half of my customers for Starter Story and Pigeon?

That is a semi-real scenario. What would I do? I would probably cancel my trip to New York and move back in with my parents. I have enough money to survive for about two years, but I would basically be living under a rock - I’m used to that now though, and it’s not so bad :)

My dad owns his home and I can stay there for free, worst comes to worst.

I could also go back to doing some contract work to bring in income, although that's a big-time last resort option for me.

I watched a really great video last night about how our mindset should be going into and through a possible recession. My big takeaway is to remain calm, don't pull your money out, keep investing per usual and focus on staying employed and keeping cash flowing.

In these times, I need to double down. Work harder. Focus on the fundamentals. While others focus on headlines and worry about the day-to-day, I need to work on staying alive - living cheaply and not needing much.

Because going through this kind of thing, many people give up. Lots of people left the real estate market in the terrible times of 2008 and 2009. But the ones who stayed and grinded it out saw the most fruits of their labor. 2008 was the best time to be in the market, even if you had to work 10x harder than before.

Luckily I have some cash and the resources to stay calm. My business is not VC funded, I'm very profitable, and I can get expenses lower than $500/month by making some small changes. 

And I'm willing to live like shit to avoid taking a shitty job or losing my businesses. But if it came to that - I'd still do it to save my businesses.