I was having lunch this past Saturday around Union Park, and I was walking past the vendors, people watching, and eating an overpriced sandwich when I looked up and noticed a 40 something year old guy smiling at me. I walked over and remarked that I enjoyed his art and that it was great he was out in the park selling.
To be honest, I don't remember his name, so we’ll call him Billy. When I asked for the best advice he’d ever gotten, a conversation I always end up having, he said, “When you’re in doubt, err toward action.”
He told me he learned it the slow way. For years, he wanted to be a photographer, and sell multimedia art but every time a door cracked open, he talked himself out of walking through it. Mostly by saying that there was too much he didn't understand, that he didn't have enough time, that he wasn't good enough yet. I could really relate as an entrepreneur who has suffered from my own fair share of imposter syndrome.
He said His life kept moving, just not in the direction he wanted. He got into a depression and it wan't until he hit a breaking point that he decided he didn't care about his doubts as much.. what did he have to lose. Billy went home, charged his old camera battery, and started again the next morning with a thirty-minute walk around his neighborhood. It still took him another full year before he started selling in the park. His point wasn’t that action fixes everything overnight.
It was that doubt feels safer than movement but it costs you. “You can adjust after you move,” he told me. “You can’t steer a parked car.”