I write to all entrepreneurs; all creators, builders, visionaries and makers of things, a note of warning you will not heed.

No one,
… no one …

can make you believe: how much it will cost, how long it will take and how audaciously difficult and achingly lonely the path you are taking is going to be.

No one can make you believe you’ll willingly hold your head under the guillotine, time and over again; or the single minded determinism with which you’ll pursue your long term goals to all but the cataclysmic collapse of your short term welfare.

No one can tell you that having risked all you had, all you have found, and all you think you might be able to get – you’ll begin to risk that which is not yours.

No one can make you believe the strength you’ll find or the odd places you will find it, how often you can lose it, stress-test it to breaking point and (seemingly irreparable) find it intact again when you need it most.

No one can explain that not only will this occur, but you’ll come to enjoy it, rely upon it, almost. How expert you’ll become in tying a neat tourniquet around each wounding disappointment and riding right back into battle as if unscathed.

Oh, don’t take my word for it of course.

Plenty of others will tell you too, and many more qualified than I. God knows, it was told to me enough times by the life-weathered and wryly amused, those who’s arrogance had eroded down to a blunt bedrock of skill and experience.

Even if you could know, if there was some way to see, you’d go ahead, you’d do it anyway. No sooner than you had would you begin to give the cautions you couldn’t perceive to others you know will not heed them.

Keats had it right, and I know it well and through enough.
It’s likely to be the next credence I get needle-inked into my skin:

“Nothing becomes real until it is experienced, a proverb is no proverb to you until your life has illustrated it.”