I’m not sure who needs to hear this today, but this is for you if you’ve been brewing an idea for a while.
You’ve got something in your head: a venture, a practice, a course, a one-person business. And instead of building it, you’re twisting yourself in knots about it. Waiting for the perfect idea, the perfect plan, the perfect moment.
In the meantime, nothing exists. It’s all still in your head.
The myth that keeps you stuck.
There’s a quiet myth a lot of high-performers carry around: if you start something, it has to be big and impressive.
If you launch a venture, it should be the next Facebook. It should justify the LinkedIn announcement and the raised eyebrows at work. And if it can’t obviously scale to seven figures, why bother?
Here’s the truth: every business you can see around you started as a punt.
Not a masterplan. A punt.
“I wonder if people would pay for this. I’ll try it and see.”
Most businesses never hire anyone; 80% don’t employ anyone beyond the director in the UK.
Only a tiny fraction ever gets near £1m. Around 6% of people in the UK exceed this figure.
There is an enormous amount of entrepreneurial freedom, creativity, and value created underneath the big unicorn scale-up radar.
Many end up doing something quite different from what they set out to do.
And yet there is intense satisfaction in building something of your own, even if it’s a small, slightly wonky side hustle that lives next to your day job.
Start with a punt.
That little experiment might grow. It might morph into something else. It might “fail” and teach you more in six months than three years of thinking ever could.
But one thing it will definitely do is build your confidence. You go from being someone who talks about starting… to someone who starts.
So if you recognise yourself in this, try this question:
What’s the smallest, scruffiest version of your idea you could put in front of a real human this month?
You don’t need to be fearless. Facing the fear and doing it anyway is a muscle, and the only way to build that muscle is to use it.
You will always have reasons not to do it. But if there’s a part of you that wants your own thing – your own tiny empire – then at some point you have to, as Richard Branson put it:
Screw it. Let’s do it anyway.
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