🧗🏽♀️ The edge of belief.
Or: how far does your faith extend? Until either you're right or the world is.
Faith is exhausting. This business of waking up and believing something that so few around you do. There are weeks and months and years even when the only difference between going on and not, is sheer will.
There’s so much ink spilled on the values of perseverance and grit in founders and really anyone that goes on to do something hard, but so little on what that grit feels like on the cusp of your doubts and dreams. The razor’s edge I walk, doom on either side.
Grit just feels gritty in my eyes, my heart. Like a rock that anchors me to my purpose or sinks me, staying my hand to cut bait when I need to.
Faith is the boulder and the burden I carry. Believing in a product-market fit I can only feel until I can prove it - gravity borne of the masses taking over from my exhausted hands.
Am I crazy? Am I wrong? The questions that dog my nights; the constants in the voice in my head.
Persistence feels like climbing the steepest of inclines while wading through molasses that has started flowing down from the peak I can’t see but can only feel, blinding holding onto a thread made of silk. But the finest, strongest spider spun silk of faith and instinct and knowing.
Each day someone else telling me maybe it’s time. Time to move on. Time to stop. Time to cut bait. Each week that someone becomes someone closer to the inner circle. The people I’ve kept around me to explicitly to tell me when it’s time, in case I’m too far gone to call it myself.
Do you give up then? Do you call it?
Maybe. I’ve had to do it before.
What makes this time different?
My users. Sending me a spark. A flare from the top that looks like a pinprick of light. And so I have all I need to keep my warm in the darkest, coldest of moments of doubt. I huddle around it, never taking my eyes from it and try to fan it into a little flame. One I stay up around the clock to not let get extinguished.
I become obsessive on another level, which from the outside just looks like desperate delusion.
Until: that moment that rewards staying alive. Staying the course. That changes everything. That opens up a path that is still perilous and steep and against the odds, but there’s a path that clears for a second and shows me exactly the way to the top.
And in that moment everything makes sense. All the dots connect in ways that I was only ever going to see on this side of faith. Of course the fog closes in and I’m again climbing that steep gradient blindly, but the map is seared into my eyelids.
It’s clear to me now that the path was felt by my gut. By years and years of toiling and learning and understanding. My gut kept me from quitting. From sending those final emails. Because I had to stay alive long enough to let my mind catch up. To explicitly connect the dots and see the path laid out in front of me.
My mind felt faith in what my gut knew.
Still. It’s exhausting. This “knowing” without knowing.
Sometimes it’s too much. Sometimes there isn’t a path that will ever make sense. And that’s okay too. Knowing when and what to quit is just as important a skill to develop as knowing when and how to go on.
But on the edge of belief, look to the flares sent by your users. Use that to guide you along the treacherous, perilous path.
Bend the world to your will, or figure out why your vision was never meant for this world.
But keep walking.