How I Wasted 4 Years Building The Wrong Business

It took me years to understand why the success felt like nothing.

There were twenty of us in the room. The supposed “7-figure elite.”

At the front sat our guru. He had recently grown a thick beard, rebranded himself as some sort of spiritual sage, and now sat in total silence while his team worked the room, pitching us dubious backend services.

Everyone was taking notes.

I wasn’t. I had a blank page in front of me and after a while I started to feel weird about it. But there was nothing to write down. I had already sold my company months earlier. I didn’t care about e-commerce. I never really had.

So why was I even here?

Because I desperately needed the whole thing to be real. Otherwise I would have had to ask what I was actually doing with my life. And I would have to explain what I did the last four years.

Back then I couldn’t see it. It turns out procrastination can get so sophisticated that you actually build something.

You might even build a business.

The Expensive Stepping Stone

Well, this is what happened to me when I built my e-commerce business. I knew from the beginning that it was only going to be a stepping stone. My idea was to scale it to a couple of million in two years, make an exit and then do the thing I actually wanted to do… Yeah, I can see the delusional thinking now.

I didn’t know what I actually wanted to do, so I tricked myself into building an e-commerce business with perfectly rational arguments. Even though I knew it was just a stepping stone, the moment I thought about the success my brain was flooded with dopamine. I got high on my own potential.

Add to that the fact that building my business involved risk and novelty and you have a powerful emotional cocktail on a regular basis. I was hooked. And suddenly I had a warehouse with hundreds of thousands of dollars in stock, which makes changing direction look pretty stupid.

But was it really true that I didn’t know what I wanted to do?

Procrastination is really just a form of avoidance.
And what we are trying to avoid is fear.

I remember that I had some sort of clue what I really wanted to do back then but I was afraid to dig deeper.

And I don’t think my case is very unique.

What could be so frightening that we go to such lengths to avoid it? The answer is so dark that we try everything to not talk or think about it: death.

Why We Create Anything at All

The fear of death sends chills down our spine. Which is why the drawer stays closed and the lid gets sealed with biohazard signs.

Ernest Becker opened the drawer in his book The Denial of Death. I’m not exaggerating when I say it literally changed my whole life.

Art, society, politics, economy… everything is an attempt to make us immortal and deny death. Becker calls this the immortality project. The fear of death gives us an immense drive to build something that leaves a footprint of us.

It led me to a pretty uncomfortable conclusion: building my business was my immortality project. I was trying to give my life significance on a cosmic scale.

It feels weird to say that. In my head I didn’t need the approval of everyone. I was doing it for myself. That‘s what I told myself, anyway. What I was actually afraid of was what it would mean if I never built anything at all.

Some people manage to keep the drawer closed seemingly forever. After reading Becker I couldn’t. My drawer didn’t close again and thus it became obvious what I was trying to do.

We are born with a deep urge to make our lives matter on a grander scale.
Building a business is one way to fulfill it.

The fear of death explains why I built my business, but it doesn’t explain why I used the e-commerce business as a stepping stone. I wanted to be significant, yes. The question is significant to whom?

Nobody Survives Alone

Humans are highly dependent on other humans. Just look at a newborn baby. Without support it won’t survive. This dependency is deeply ingrained into us. It is part of the human condition. Naturally it creates a second kind of primal fear: the fear of separation.

It’s for that reason that loneliness feels so painful.

While the fear of death seems abstract and distant, the fear of separation is something much more immediate. There was probably at least one day in the last couple of weeks when you have felt it.

Or think about a heartbreak. Some people say it’s like an ice pick that’s slowly pushed through their heart. I don’t know about you, but I would rather work eight hours a day for a boss than having to go through that experience.

Being alone makes you vulnerable to death. That’s where the two primal fears connect. One puts you to work. The other one decides what you work on.

Why I Built the Wrong Thing

I already had a hunch that the e-commerce thing wasn’t really my ultimate destination. There was something lingering in the background, but I couldn’t explain it or put words to it back then. So I went for it anyways.

The arguments for building an e-commerce business were… perfectly rational. Looking back at it now, it’s clear to me what happened.

Building an e-commerce business was a pre-approved script. I followed the guru because he already “made it.” He was legitimized to teach how he did it because it led to a definition of success that gets rewarded by society (money and fame).

You look at how other people did it and of course you see only those who survived. That’s how I stumbled onto the guru and bought his blueprint for $8k. I was looking for reassurance that this is a viable path.

By following the script you get the safety of the crowd. You follow the script, just slightly different. So it even seems like you are doing your own thing.

Looked at it from this angle, though, it’s not much different from a 9 to 5. You are running a script of what you are supposed to be.

That’s why even when you are supposedly successful you end up feeling empty. You are not building your thing. You are running a script thinking you are building your thing.

Building a business, accumulating wealth, or climbing a corporate ladder are all ready-made, pre-approved paths provided by society. Society has already agreed that if you succeed at this, you will get recognition.

That gives us the significance that we are seeking.

For years I was immersed in the fictional games and success metrics set up by society. It took me a long time to see it, because by those metrics my business was doing “good.” Supposedly I was doing everything right.

It was during corona that I realized that I was just running a script. And the reason I entered entrepreneurship in the first place was because I wanted to run my own script.

It took me another two years before I could really see my own path.

Smart People Are Not Afraid

Really doing your own thing feels risky… because well it is. Most of you reading this are driven to do your own thing. And you know there comes a certain fear with it. But it doesn’t feel exactly like fear. At least not the way it feels when your bank account shows zero.

That’s the sneaky part. The fear is lingering somewhere in the background.

Smart people hate fear. So they try to use their rational mind to overcome it. That’s where the procrastination gets really sophisticated.

“I better build a strategy before I start.” → Makes sense.

“I better use an advanced stochastic model to cluster my audience into socio-economic segments to improve the resonance of my messaging.” → Also makes sense (kind of).

There is always one more thing before you can do the actual thing.

“I want to help poor people in Africa… but how am I going to make money?”

That’s a rational question to ask. But it’s probably the wrong one. Because now you started a sequence of “But first I have to…“

“I want to help poor people in Africa, but first I have to make a lot of money.”

“I want to launch my product, but first I have to build a strategy.”

“I want to write that article, but first I have to go to the toilet.”

You are smart, of course you are not afraid. You are just making a rational choice. The smarter you are, the better your excuses can get.

I catch myself doing this all the time. I come up with some complex theories. They totally make sense. The funny thing is that right in the moment other people start agreeing with me, I realize I just made up an excellent excuse to hide from my fear. Most of the time my intellectual excuses help others hide from their fears too. So they happily agree with me.

So we end up looking for a safe path calling it a rational choice. It makes sense logically, but not psycho-logically.

That’s exactly why I ended up ignoring my voice. The reason I couldn‘t explain what I actually wanted to do isn‘t that it was irrational. The thing didn’t exist yet, so there were no arguments for it. Nobody could agree on it. Its justification can only be built afterward, out of the finished work.

Giving Birth Is Painful

Just because you found a path yourself doesn’t mean it is your path.

The fear you feel for walking your own path is your compass. You might not (yet) be able to explain to others what you are doing. Good. It means the path has not been approved by society.

Sophisticated procrastination really means running away from your own path. You are using your potential as a way to hide. It feels comfortable because it gives you a womb-like feeling of oneness. It protects you from messy and harsh reality of nature.

You are refusing to be born.

And by refusing to be born you deprive yourself and the world of the gift that is inside of you. For you to be born your old identity first has to die. Letting one version of you die is painful. And it’s painful exactly because so much has to die.

For me, the definition of success I imported from society had to die. After letting it die, I couldn’t help but do my work. I didn’t need motivation, discipline, or an elusive purpose. I was just doing what I was born to do.

You have to create yourself, not your business.

Either you give birth every day, or your potential dies with you.

P.S. You can’t create yourself out of nothing. You start with the material you already have. Archetypes are one way to see what that material actually is.

I built the Archetype Navigator as a free tool to uncover your natural psychological patterns. It won't tell you what to build. That’s your part.