I worked really hard on Moda Jewels for three years, but sales plateaued at the end of the first year and I couldn’t figure out how to get them up to the next level. What was particularly frustrating was that the plateau came at the break-even point, which meant the business wasn’t losing money, but I was working for free.
Some of the revenue was going to Google for ads I was running. Some of the revenue was going to the third-party fulfillment house in Michigan I started using because the unpredictable international postal service was causing me too many customer service headaches. Some of the revenue was going, of course, to my suppliers, and what was left was going to a handful of smaller players in my business’ operations. After those people were paid at the end of each month, there was nothing left over for me.
For the first two years I could reassure myself that this was normal for a new business, and whenever I needed money I could just dip into the savings I had brought with me to Istanbul.
In the third year however, those savings began to run out. After three years of me pulling back harder and harder on the joystick and praying the plane would take off before it got to the end of the runway, the plane was getting to the end of the runway. It was going full speed, but it hadn’t gotten off the ground yet, and it was about to go skidding off into the grass where it would disintegrate into a million pieces.
One day I walked into a McDonald’s and realized the teenagers behind the counter were working fewer hours and making more money than I was. It was time to admit Moda Jewels wasn’t going to work. It was time to give up, at least on this, at least for the time being.
The decision to shutter Moda Jewels was a gut-wrenching one. It didn’t just mean walking away from a lot of hard work. It meant walking away, at least for a while, from the dream of owning my own business. It meant walking away, at least for a while, from the dream of being able to work from anywhere. Moda Jewels was a virtual, internet-based business, something I could run from anywhere in the world. I was about to have family on two continents, and I figured life would be a lot easier if I had an income independent of my location. I had made it my mission to make that happen, and shuttering Moda Jewels meant giving up on that mission, at least for a while.
When we embark on a mission, if we hold something back and the mission fails, we can tell ourselves that we could have succeeded if only we had given it everything. We might be deceiving ourselves, but the illusion allows us to continue feeling good about ourselves. It gives us a place to hide.
However, if we don’t hold anything back, if we give the mission everything we have, if we dig deep and find within ourselves resources we never even knew were there, and the mission still fails, we have nowhere to hide. There is no shield to protect us. We have to live knowing full well that our best was not good enough.
Knowing our best was not good enough strikes a wound that scabs over but never truly heals. If we find it within ourselves to get back up on our feet and commit fully to something else in life, we will do it stronger, more capable people. We will do it with a feeling of freedom and confidence we would not have if we had not previously rolled the dice and lost everything.
There will still be days, though, when all we will feel is pain from the price we paid for that feeling of freedom and confidence.
[This is an excerpt from the chapter “Selling jewelry” in A Tight Wide-open Space.]