Bring forth the future from nothing

Starting a company is exhausting, expensive, uncertain and unpromising.

No wonder fifty percent of small businesses fail after five years.

The good news is, if you have a healthy relationship with the future, that is, if you trust the future despite your inability to predict it, then you can gain perspective about the emotional struggle that’s weighing you down in the moment.

When you read any of the biographies, memoirs or autobiographies of entrepreneurs, this relationship with the future is very apparent.

Gates. Jobs. Musk. Bezos. Benioff. Zuckerberg.

These creators are the ones who had a prescient glimpse of some new reality that already existed out in the ether. And they committed to visioning, prototyping, productizing and ultimately selling that future. In most cases, for billions of dollars.

What’s fascinating is, each of their hero’s journey contains similar emotional threads.

The founders all believed their company would have a massive impact relative to the effort and cost of starting it.

The founders all believed the experience of starting their enterprise would ultimately make them many times more useful to the world.

And they all believed that selling a small vision and selling a big vision would take the same amount of energy, so they went ahead dreamed big.

Because why not?

This type of existential courage is not easy. Anyone who brings forth future from nothing has quite the journey ahead of them. But it’s not exclusive to geniuses, billionaires, corporate executes and tech entrepreneurs.

Each one of us can develop our healthy relationship with the future. It’s more imagination than talent, more ambition than skill. And when doubt, failure and rejection come crashing down, we’ll be glad we have it.

There’s a tool in personal creative management called future self, which is treating things you do today as compassionate investments in yourself that you recoup later on. This intervention is wildly helpful when tasks in front of you are exhausting, expensive, uncertain and unpromising.

I’ve used future self many times in my career, both as an entrepreneur and employee, and what helps is wrapping uplifting language around your experience. Almost like a form of emotional time travel.

Here’s the greatest hits from my own inner monologue, and I encourage you to write some of your own affirmations to help you cope with your unique business challenges

I look forward to looking back on this.
I am building skills here that contribute to my story as an individual.
I am growing in ways that nobody can take away from me.
I am becoming something through this experience that’s more valuable than the experience itself.

Compassionate communication like this fuels our resilience. Because once we can see the distance between vision and reality, that tension creates energy. It generates structural pull.

We become attuned to the path between where we are and where we want to be. And that motivates us to close the gap between current self and future self.

Now, there’s no guarantee we’ll make billions of dollars, or any dollars at all.

But let’s not pretend that money is the thing that will finally make us happy.

It’s the journey of bringing forth the future from nothing that’s everything.

What if you trusted the future despite your inability to predict it?