“Ok. If you don’t want to work on the program anymore then I’ll call you when I have the other product. Talk to you when I talk to you”.

He hung up the call in a mood more sour than milk (“de mala leche”).

I basically had told him I was no longer interested in the work I was doing. When I came to him, I had a vision to build his brand and sell his product through organic marketing.

I was excited about it. He was excited about it.

But in less than a month, he decided to change course and start running ads.

He wanted to scale fast.

It created a plethora of problems.

Hiring problems. Delivery problems. Accounting problems.

All of the work that fell on Ray (my life & business partner) and I’s plates because he couldn’t handle it himself.

None of which we are interested in doing.

It seemed like the last 6 months have been nothing but fixing problems.

So we reflected.

This wasn’t a job. It was an investment.

And the risk keeps getting higher and higher as we stray further and further away from our vision.

So we decided it was time to focus on our own thing.

This is the second time we part ways with a client (read about the 1st here). We have landed 2.

The third time we leave a secured income with no back up plan, counting our traditional jobs.

Are WE the problem?

To be honest with you, the answer is probably yes.

We only want to do things that make sense to us. And because we have this delusional conviction that our time is the most important thing in the world, we simply have no margins to put up with anyone’s bs anymore.

Over the last years, it meant parting ways with high paying clients and cutting our income in half to nothing to protect our most important asset — time.

It meant feeling insecure, ashamed, pressured, anxious.

Once again, we put ourselves in this position — no jobs, no income.

What do we do now?

What if we don’t figure it out?

What if we run out of money?

What if we never do anything meaningful and end up having to crawl back to one of these shit jobs?

Am I really ready to jump back into this incessant pool of uncertainty again? To be infested with self-doubts and run into the occasional clumps of floating self-pity?

If I dig really deep, and I mean really really deep like I was trying to get to China, I know what the answer is.

I know how much I was able to grow from the last time I jumped into this pool.

I’ve learned new skills, I’ve sharpened my mind, I’ve found balance between consistency and hard work.

I know what I want. And I know how to figure out how to get it.

I trust myself.

The thing about making a jump is that it always looks scarier than it is. Your mind is really good at conjuring up all the possible worst case scenarios.

Yet it has no IDEA the ecstasy, the high, the feeling of being alive once you get out of the water.

Truth is, not a single one of us is willing to go down without a fight. It’s in our DNA.

The pool might look dark, scary and downright disgusting.

But we will survive it. It’s what life herself has equipped us to do.

It’s where we find our superpower.

So here I go.

You coming?

Update: I wrote this newsletter the day of the call — Thursday. Today my client told me he was willing to go the direction that I wanted.

Yet now that I’ve made the jump, I don’t know if I want to get back to where I was.

What do I do?