Last weekend our house, our paradise, our sanctuary was ransacked. We were burgled at a time when we least expected it. They trashed the house, leaving it as if 💣a bomb had hit it. When we arrived home, it seemed like the whole house has been turned upside down, or pulled inside out.
They had pulled out every drawer, broken every closet, thrown everything out onto the floor, turned all the beds upside down, and thrown all the picture frames down in search of a possible (none existent) safe behind them.
The sight of arriving at the scene after what was a short Christmas shopping and a nice meal out with my partner was devastating. At first I thought my partner had left a window open, but then we looked inside and everything was trashed (upside down) in her office. All the papers, books, and documents. I thought, well that’s not too bad until I saw the next room, and the next room, and the next room, and …
We thought it would have never happened to us. We do not have a routine, we are usually home. We have guard dogs. But above all, we never wear gold, diamond, or jewelry that might otherwise attract attention. We have no fancy handbags, clothes, watches, or anything of that kind.
We never thought we would be a target and we must have been a great disappointment for they walked away with so little.
However, there is a lesson to be learnt from everything that happens to us in life.
The fact is that we face setbacks and challenges in our lives every day, and every coin has two sides.
Having been through some very tough times during my startup life, I have come to learn to detach from the 💍material world. Of course, the shock and the experience is never nice, but the good thing is my startup experience has allowed me to look at it with a calm head.
After the initial shock, I quickly established where we were. No one was hurt, our dogs were OK, and the rest was just material damage.
Detaching. The best startup lesson.
Startups are a wonderful fountain of life lessons. If I had not been through the problems in my startup life, I think I would have found it much harder, yet being able to keep my cool, detaching from the situation, and assessing the important things, allowed me to push through what could have been a worse reaction to the situation.
For that reason, I want to tell you about learning how to detach. The ability to detach was a hard lesson that I learnt during my startup life. A few years after I poured all my might, effort, and finances into Urbytus.es things did not go as planned, the recession hit the economy hard and I had to start laying off staff, and downsizing.
Downsizing, also meant letting go of the office I had two years earlier invested thousands of euros in refurbishing and furnishing. It was a good chunk of investment. It was before the rise of co-working places. I believed in having a comfortable workplace as we spend more than 70% of our waking and living life in it.
I could let go of everything but the office. I was holding on to it with my teeth. Honestly. It might be hard for you to understand, but it was as important a place as my house. If you think of it, it is the little heaven I had created where I did my creative work, where I created value, where I earnt my living and …
However the pressure was building, the rent was high, the maintenance expensive and my income dwindling.
Finally, there came a time that the numbers did not work. I had to take a decision. A decision based on logic, and not on emotions.
The decision was to write off the office investment as a loss. let go of it and move on. I was keeping on to it, because I thought anytime I could get a new investment. I was showing this on my balance sheet and as an asset to investors. I was hoping that this would help bring in investors as it reduced the setup and startup costs but the investment did not materialize in that time frame.
As soon as I let go of that fear. As soon as I decided to write it off and remove the burden of that thought and attachment, was the moment where everything turned around. The economy picked up, my income grow, I hired more, the investors appeared and I ended up not having to leave the office or write it off.
The lesson for me was to learn to let go when needed. Learn to detach from the material world and what was not important.
This startup lesson has helped me enormously on how to deal with this recent incident in our life. Yes we are shocked but it is only material. It has not stopped our passion for life, work, and the good people in our lives and all the good people around the world.
👉 Embrace the challenges in your startup life.
💎 They are all valuable lessons.
🏰 The material world can be replaced.
👨👩👧 Cherrish, your family, health, and colleagues.
🍇 Success: is the fruit of you following your passion.