Where am I?

Below is an excerpt from an email that I had recently sent someone. Funny thing is that I feel like it fits well here for others to see and perhaps express how they feel. Obviously, some things have been modified and this doesn’t include everything.

I’m having those feelings of restlessness again. I know what I want to be doing, like we had discussed 3 years ago. I want to either be doing IT consulting on my own or in a small team, or build a SaaS product, or a combination of the two. I’m not sure if I don’t have the discipline to make the transition or what. I know over the past few years, I got complacent because I enjoyed working with a lot of the people I was working with and I got raises and a bonus each year, so it was easy to get complacent. I still worked on things on the side, but never really pushed it. I see no reason I couldn’t be successful or build something successful. Right now, I’ve got an idea that I’m working on the preselling stage for (creating mockups and making contacts).
Maybe I need to be surrounded with like-minded people who want to build something awesome and are ready to be done with the 8-5.
Maybe I need a plan of attack so that I know if I follow the process it will get me to success.
I don’t know what I need, but I desperately want to succeed at this so I can have some freedom and flexibility. I’ve started writing some blog posts on early retirement, because I’m intrigued by the prospects of being able to do what I want. It’s not that I would stop working, it’s just that I would start doing the things that interest me and probably be 10 times more successful.
Wow, that was a lot to lay out there at once, sorry for unloading it all at once.

Why do we let what other people think bother us?

Recently I posted something on Craigslist that ended up being flagged and deleted by a user after being out there over a month. When I posted in the Craigslist forums to figure out what I had done wrong, the responses I got were note what I expected.

Out of all the responses I got in the forums, many of them had a negative tone towards my original posting. (For what it’s worth, it wasn’t an item for sale.)

While the base of what many of the people in the forum said may have been correct, the way they worded their responses was rude and discolored the heart of what they were saying. It was almost like they were waiting for the next fish to jump in the piranha tank.

The worse part about it is that it was making me feel like I was the bad person. Why is that? Why am I letting people I don’t even know make me feel like I’m a bad person or did something wrong? Why is the rudeness of others causing me to feel like less of a person and like what I was trying to do was wrong?

It seems like we can be moving along on our journey and things are going well, but we allow others to knock us off the path of success (even if we don’t know them personally). We could have 10 people say something positive to us, but it only takes 1 to tear us back down.

We can harden our hearts so that others cannot penetrate it and cause us pain, while possibly blocking the good things that happen, or we can soften our hearts and allow everything in, the good and the bad.

What do you do? How do you handle negative experiences when they come up?

Daily Prayer

Lord,

Please give me confidence in myself to move forward, and help me to see past the doubt and fear that tries to invade and take over my life and control me. Its paralyzing effects have no place in my life.

Amen