One guest told me she still gets scared before every launch. Years into running a successful online business, and the fear hadn't gone anywhere.
That stuck with me. In 2019 I ran an online summit called One Conversation Away, 28 interviews over a fortnight, and each person told me about a conversation that changed their life. Going back through them now, I keep spotting the same pattern. Nobody I spoke to had got rid of fear or self-doubt. The ones getting results had simply stopped waiting for it to leave before they did anything.
That same guest had built a fitness business online, and she'd pushed her podcast back twice. When she finally put it out, it became her favourite thing she does. Her way of looking at it was that everything needs a first version. A phone company doesn't get to version ten without a clunky version one. You have to ship the 1.0 so there's something to improve. I liked that, partly because of the podcast I co-hosted, Your Best Year Starts Here. We recorded the first four episodes on a dictaphone with two cheap mics clipped on. My book is called Done Beats Perfect, and I think she'd agree with every word of the title.
A filmmaker I interviewed put it more bluntly. She said that to get started you need a picture of what you want and a willingness to jump, and you can manage without fully believing you can do it. By her own admission she still struggles with self-belief, and she jumps anyway. Early on she sold her first film clients on how a film would look before she knew how to shoot it, and then had to keep swimming till she reached the island. I'd be wary of recommending overpromising to anyone. Still, I recognised that feeling of committing first and working out the rest after.
Another guest asks herself every day what the thing is that she's scared to do. When she was offered the chance to host a summit, the voice in her head asked who she thought she was and told her she'd be rubbish at interviews. She said yes anyway. An hour before her first interview she was sweating. Afterwards she felt on top of the world, and her thinking was simple. If she could do it once, she could do it again. Then she got better. At first she clung to a list of questions and wasn't really hearing people. Only later did she learn to drop the script and listen. That improvement only happened because she'd started before she was any good.
Starting is half of it. The other half is fixing things as you go, and the guest who taught me most about that sold a physical product she'd made herself. Her advice when you're stuck was to take one small action, because action creates clarity and it cures fear too. When she first moved her business online, the offer was wrong and her sales presentation was far too long for what people were buying. So she cut it right down and kept reworking the offer. Earlier on she'd spent months on a product, then sold nothing at a market stall in the rain. Painful. It taught her to find out what people actually wanted. She was also careful about risk. She'd spent years proving her product before going all in, and she warned against quitting a job before you've made the thing work.
A martial arts coach I spoke to said perfectionism had held his business back and made him unfairly critical of new staff. Someone told him practice makes progress, and he passes that on to his students now. He also talked about embracing the suck, because you're going to be bad at anything when you first start. And one guest who runs a couple of businesses asks himself a few questions in the shower each night, including what went well and what he could do better tomorrow. That's course correction built into a habit. Start, then adjust.
Looking back, what I notice is that the fear in these stories never shrank before people acted. Where it eased at all, it eased afterwards, and only a little. So waiting to feel ready means waiting for something that might never turn up. The guest with the fitness business is years in and still gets scared before every launch.
What I took from this one
- Fear before a launch is normal, even for people who've launched plenty of times.
- Ship the first version so you've got something real to fix.
- When you're stuck, one small action today tells you more than another week of thinking.
- A quick nightly check on what to do differently tomorrow keeps the corrections small.
