No one is exempt from bad days - days when the weight of the world is on your shoulders and you question the decisions you've made. There's a feeling I get in my chest sometimes, like my heart is pounding a bit too hard, and a mix of discomfort and sadness are pulling the strings. The source is almost always the same - regret.
A friend of mine once told me that the only thing that could change a person's nature, their very character, was the emotion of regret - the feeling that things could have been different, and better, had you walked a different road, accepted the tough choices and followed through. Unlike the simplicty of a child's learning process - trial and error, mistake and correction - regret is an adult version of growing and learning. It's more subtle, harder to swallow and frequently overlooked by those who aren't yet ready to accept responsibility for their actions.
As a business owner, you automatically assume responsibilty for the welfare of your employees, your customers and many times, your family, too. With the great rewards of building a successful firm comes direct accountability - if a contract sours, a client leaves unsatisfied, or the accounts don't have the funds to meet payroll, it's the face in the mirror that's hardest on the eyes. Placing blame may lighten the load, but to me it's merely a sign of immaturity or inexperience, which is not to say that I'm not guilty of those, too.
Today (and tonight), I'm wrestling with one of the toughest decisions I've faced in a long time. A project that I committed to is struggling and my choices are to:
A) Honor the commitments I've made on behalf of my firm, invest the time and resources necessary to make the project work and do it despite my own misgivings about the potential upsides and strong resistance from my staff OR
B) Back out, cut our losses and turn our time and effort towards projects where we have a greater chance for success
The mistakes on this project haven't come from misguided link building campaigns, bad keyword selection or a poor user experience - instead, they're issues of managing people, emotions, personalities and competing egos. A wiser manager would have found solutions to these issues before they came to a head, but I did not.
And so my heart beats a little harder tonight and sleep doesn't come as easily, which begs the question - is it worth it? The regret, the doubt, the misgivings and the struggle? The smaller salary, the late nights, and the challenges of management? Luckily, this answer is always an easy one - absolutely. If it were twice as hard, the answer would still be the same and the reason is simple. I love what I do and I have a commitment to building something much bigger than myself. If you take one thing away from this post, I hope it's this final point - that when you feel regret, you can find the strength to shoulder the burden, make the tough decisions and love what you do, even when those decisions are wrong.
Now, since I'm finally feeling sleepy (and a bit a cathartic), I've got to make up my mind and catch some "z"s.
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