Fear of mistakes and risks? Why? Those are the best things in life!!!

Well, this is the final week of my gift store. Well, it’s a long story but I’ll summarize it for you.

Two years ago I decided to quit my job because I was tired of the path I was taking and I wanted to be independent (meaning not working for somebody else). I didn’t have much money at that point and started a little business of my own: a gift store with many novelties that were not to be found anywhere in my city. I didn’t do much market research and I thought that the products I was trying to sell were so awesome that people were going to buy it without hesitation. Unfortunately, things in my country are really different from what I expected, and after 2 years of investing money in renting a place and trying to make the business grow, I came to the conclusion that it was not profitable. I was never good in accounting and finance, but I know that in the course of those 2 years I have invested a significant amount of money and I haven’t recovered not a third of it, yeah it sucks…. But I’m actually happy, I‘ll tell you later why.

So right now, everything is on sale at my store, and while I write this blog, I’m sitting here in my store trying to get some of the merchandise sold until this Friday – the due date for the rent contract.

So, how do I feel? Actually pretty relieved and I can’t wait for this weekend to arrive. Maybe in some way, it has become such an economic burden, through this time, that I’m willing to let it go.

At the same time, I’ve just started working full time as a technical writer in a Software development company, and you may think, well she has her job so she’s going to be ok. Indeed, I’m going to have a very relaxing next week, leaving my job at 5 and going to my home just to rest, because I used to run to my store after work and stay until 9 pm. I used to live in my store on weekends too, and it was really exhausting.

The thing is that my resting plan is only for next week, because I have learnt that being an entrepreneur and being independent HAS NO PRICE!!! It’s very fulfilling, so I’m just turning my physical store into a virtual store, and I have many plans for my website and that kind of stuff… let’s see how things go.

The learning experience, given the fact that I’ve lost money, has been priceless and I’ve already passed the worst and from here to the future I’m pretty sure things will go up. The scariest part is when you start doing a business of your own, you take so many risks, you quit your job and you make so many mistakes along the path.  But for me,  the worst part is gone, I don’t feel scary anymore, I know the mistakes I made and what I should do to avoid them, I’ve grown a lot and I don’t fear for things to come! So if there is something good for you in this, is that mistakes and risks are part of your life, don’t be afraid of them, they only make you STRONGER!!!!

People have tried to cheer me up, seeing this as a failure, and I keep thinking why are they doing that? This is actually GOOD!  A NEW START! With better defined goals, better experience and NO FEAR at ALL!!!

LESSON OF THE BLOG: Don’t give up, learn from your mistakes and rise higher!!!