I first got the entrepreneurial itch in 2013.

I remember standing in front of 450 first year university students explaining how they could start their careers with a bang by applying for spring internships at investment banks.

We'd coordinated with recruiters at Barclays, booked out the biggest lecture hall on campus and promoted the event for weeks. This was just one of 100+ events we ran that year to help students at Warwick get jobs in finance and professional services.

I was running this with my best friend Will Fairbairn with a 30+ person team. We were basically running a small company.

But when it came time to pick a career for myself, I did exactly what I'd told those 450 students to do. I took a job in investment banking at Goldman Sachs.

That would prepare me for building a company, right? I needed skills first.

After a few years at Goldman, the little voice inside my head was more convinced than ever that I wanted to be an entrepreneur. But I didn’t know what to build.

So I got a job in investing because I thought that being closer to founders would make the jump to doing my own thing easier.

In both cases, I thought I was doing the right thing.

Getting closer to my dreams right?

In both cases, I was taking the easiest path. The path that my environment told me to.

Neither of these were the brave choice.

The brave decision would have been booking a one-way flight to San Francisco and figuring it out from there.

Now I'm not saying my experience in finance hasn't helped me. It has. But the most valuable experience for becoming a good entrepreneur has been the nearly 4 years I've actually been doing it.

So why didn’t I just do it?

Because I had all these barriers in my head:

"It's really hard to get a visa in America."
"You don't even know what you want to build yet."
“I don’t have a co-founder yet.”

The thing is, I didn't come up with those reasons on my own. The reason they felt so real is because everyone around me believed them too.

My friends were in finance and law. They are great people, but their worldview and mine was incredibly narrow. When everyone around you sees the same small world, you assume the world is small.

But now that I'm in San Francisco, I've met many people who had those exact same challenges and still just came. Getting a visa. Finding a co-founder. Building a community.

All of these things were hard. But not impossible.

I eventually moved to San Francisco and started a company. And in the first year I learned more about building a company than I did in my 5 years of stepping stone jobs.

So if you're sitting there with a list of reasons why you can't do the thing you actually want to do, ask yourself:

Are those reasons actually true, or did your environment come up with them for you?

See you next week,

Will

P.S. talking about challenges - if LinkedIn feels challenging, here are 6 LinkedIn post ideas that generated >1 million views between them for me and my clients.

Will McTighe

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