Don’t look down.

Photo by Josh Soriano on Unsplash

2022 was a rough year following a few rough years.

COVID happened; my dad passed unexpectedly while I was six month’s pregnant; and Russia invaded Ukraine, where WLCM’s team was based. A lot of things shifted, chief among them my worldview, and not for the better. I started getting scared.

Now that I’d seen it in real time, the possibility of total collapse became real to me, and the company I’d built seemed suddenly fragile. Because this is the way the mind works, my newfound fear conjured fresh evidence of this fragility everywhere I looked.

Once someone who jumped from planes and went on plant medicine journeys in the Amazon, I became, if only in the secret dark corners of my mind, a bit of a catastrophist. I developed anxiety and insomnia, and I started to experience something new and entirely terrifying: panic attacks (IYKYK!).

Now on the other side, with health and happiness and a sense of ease regained, it occurs to me that the cartoons of my childhood had it right: don’t look down.

As entrepreneurs, we are Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff. The whole point is to make a new path, but the stakes are high. The only way to make it is to keep our chins up.

“Looking down” might mean trying to calculate your odds (“be realistic!”), counting your competitors, or eyeing your runway with a sinking sense of doom. It seems rational, but don't do it.

When it comes to building a business (or a life), be more excited about what could go right than scared of what could go wrong.

As long as you keep that balance tipped just a bit more toward excitement than fear, you’re good. Sure, plug the holes that need to be plugged, but also: go make the things that excite you — and keep moving. The ground will appear beneath you. The future will unfold.