Do The Verb To Become The Noun
Chasing after who you want to become is hard
Hey Friends,
We all aspire to be something.
Entrepreneur. Writer. Investor. Musician. YouTuber.
But as Austin Kleon puts it best: “Lots of people want to be the noun without doing the verb.”
Not everyone wants to put in the effort required to become something.
The brutal reality is that saying you’re something is meaningless if you aren’t going to back it up with action.
This isn’t to take a swipe at you because I’m guilty of this too.
Back in April 2020, when I had the idea for my first business – importing, roasting and supplying high-quality Vietnamese coffee – I was excited to call myself an ‘entrepreneur’. I created a business plan packed with graphs, bar charts, and arbitrarily forecasted projection numbers. I updated my bio on social media to: Poker Player turned Entrepreneur. I was using it as a way to signal to other people the new direction in my life.
But as Mike Tyson once said, “Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth.”
Reality set in and slapped me hard in the face. The first year was rough. Poker drained my energy to the point where I had little brain power to work on my business idea. When I managed to work on it, I didn’t know what I was doing and was left paralysed by the insurmountable list of problems.
I didn’t know how I was going to get my hands on high-quality Vietnamese coffee beans (COVID-19 made it impossible to fly to Vietnam). Even if I did import the beans, how would I roast them? I wasn’t certified, and it’d take years of training to become a roaster. Anyone I tried to talk to from the coffee industry either ignored me or told me to talk to someone else. I didn’t know how to sell either. And worst of all, I dropped a bunch of money on design and branding without a product.
From my girlfriend’s perspective, I looked like I was doing nothing and burning money. And she was right. I wanted to be an entrepreneur without the entrepreneur-ing.
But after exchanging some hurtful words and getting dumped, hellbent on proving my ex wrong, I took action. I found a coffee broker in Vietnam who could source the best green coffee beans and ship them to the UK. I also discovered an independent coffee roaster in Bristol who was willing to roast for me, and I closed two deals to supply two restaurants in Birmingham.
A farmer from the Lam Dong of Vietnam showing my coffee broker the coffee cherries
Coffee pallet arriving in the UK for me to collect
From green coffee beans to roasted coffee to cupping
Packing orders and delivering them to restaurants. The bags are 1kg.
Working with restaurants to come up with recipes: Coconut Vietnamese Coffee
Six months later, I placed my coffee business on the back burner and switched over to freelance copywriting (for a year), which has now led me to build a marketing and advertising agency with a friend.
And while I’ve made lots of progress and accumulated some great business stories (which I’ll share someday), I don’t feel qualified to call myself an entrepreneur. The way I see it is I’m on one of the lowest rungs of a very long business ladder, and I have to keep showing up every single day and verb my way to the top. I can’t help but feel I landed my copywriting clients through luck. So I’m proving to myself I can replicate my wins, creating that stack of undeniable proof that I am who I say I am.
The same goes for writing. Despite being easily discovered online, I seldom tell people I know in real life that I’m a writer. While I know this newsletter has had over 6000+ views since its launch last year, and I’ve published every week, I’m still trying to earn my stripes.
You can’t start something by giving yourself a title and expecting success to follow. You can’t wake up one morning and write ‘Entrepreneur’ in your X/Twitter bio and expect to have a multimillion-dollar company. You can’t claim you’re a writer without writing and publishing.
Instead, you have to put in countless hours, work your ass off, get hit in the face, get back up and keep going in order to earn the title.
Labelling yourself as an entrepreneur, writer, or YouTuber is not a requisite for future success. It comes down to how bad do you want it and how much you’re willing to endure to achieve it. As Isadore Sharp, the founder of the Four Seasons Hotel, once said, “Excellence is the capacity to take pain.”
Anybody that’s done anything difficult knows it consists of two emotions: Euphoria and terror. There’s no such thing as “I started, and everything went smoothly and great.” That’s the problem with social media. It shows us only the good times and has fooled us into thinking that we can change with little effort on our part. It never shows the whole story: The defeats, the tears, the late nights and the empty bank accounts. The good days are few and far between.
I’m not saying don’t pursue your goals because it’s almost impossible. I’m saying it’s supposed to be hard. I know it’s cliched to say but remember: if it were easy, everybody would do it.
Staying committed to who you want to become requires a touch of madness. It means turning up every day, taking action and having the faith and belief you will become the noun.
The noun is the dream.
The verb is the story.