A few weeks go by and you’ve invested some serious time and effort (and maybe even money) into this effort.  You have the basics of a business plan, a rough sketch of a marketing plan and you’ve even told your family.  Everyone’s in your corner, rooting for you.

A few more weeks pass and you hit the wall… You realize that you didn’t do as much market research as you thought.  Maybe there’s another company that’s already doing what you’re doing.  Maybe the costs to start will be too high for you to handle.  What do you do?!

You can’t just “stop” because you’ve already told your friends and family about it and to stop now would mean losing face.  It would mean that forever more, you’re labeled as that dreamer that never gets things done but talks about those things all the time.

Relax.  We’ve all been there and we’ve all given up on a few ideas.  But at this point, you need to stop and think.  Take a break from starting this company of yours and assess if it’s really worth continuing.  The simplest thing to do at this point is to make a list of your alternatives.  What’s the alternative use of your time?  What’s the alternative use of your money?

Next, take those alternatives and create a little table to assess the pro’s and cons.  List EVERY pro (even the dumb ones) and EVERY con (ESPECIALLY the dumb ones) just to keep the analysis accurate.  After you’ve compiled your list of alternatives and the pros and cons of either staying on course or pursuing an alternative, STOP.  DO NOT DECIDE ANYTHING.

Give it a week to simmer, then look at your list and cross out the pros that are overlapping.  For example if you have three options:

1. Continuing to work on the business
2. Getting a job
3. Going back to school

If all three have a pro of “gives me a productive way to spend my day”, then cross that pro out!  Same with the cons.

Now that you have your FINAL list, spend some time thinking it over.  Which of those pros and cons do you really care about and which are just there for the sake of being there.

Remember, there’s no shame in throwing in the towel if it’s for good reason.  And quitting early may be better than quitting late.  I’d love to get your stories on when/how you quit ideas, so please leave comments.

All of the books are on bookshelves, which are arranged like you would imagine: in rows.  What had happened was one of the bookshelves cracked (presumably due to the heat) and it toppled over taking ALL of the other bookshelves with it.  Imagine dominoes.  The team spent the better part of the week putting the books back on the shelves… one by one.

So what did I learn through this experience?  Crisis management.  When something catastrophic happens (and it will), it’s best to take a few minutes to step back and reflect on the situation at hand.  Understanding the priorities is also crucial to figuring out how to solve the newly created problem.

What I find most interesting is the way in which things happened.  There are over 20 rows of shelving and any one of those shelves could have cracked but it happened to be the one at the end.  The one that cracked COULD HAVE fallen the other way (where there are no other shelves), but instead it chose to fall in the direction of the rest of the books.  Amazing, ain’t it?

So in short, I’m REALLY proud of the BookSwim team for getting it all together to put the books back and make the operation fully operational again.  Truly an inspiring thing to be a part of.  One thing that I wish we did was take more pictures.  It would have been awesome to document the process of putting things back together, but I guess that’s just another lesson learned.

“Only after disaster can we be resurrected.” -Tyler Durden

My biggest issue is that I’ve already thought about what they are lecturing about so I know why it is feasible or why it can’t be done.  When I was a youth.. just a few months ago… I would often chastise these advice-givers in my mind.  But now that I’m an adult (almost 26 years old… boo hoo), I listen a lot more.  It doesn’t hurt to listen to the advice and THEN ignore it but it’s a disaster to ignore it from the get-go.

Not sure if I can stress that enough.  I talk to lots of entrepreneurs, or wannabe entrepreneurs, and they’re all waiting for something.”I just need to work for a few more months before I launch my great idea”"I don’t have enough experience to be my own boss”Boo hoo.  Cry me a river.  Keep stalling.  Who’s it hurting?  YOU.  If you have an idea for a business, it’s never too early to get started.  You may not have the resources available to you all the time to do what you want to do, but you can certainly plan until the resources become available.A good general rule is: do everything you can until you can’t do anything more. So what does that mean?  If you want to start a restaurant but don’t have the capital to get going, it doesn’t mean you should just sit and wait for the money to show up.  That’d be outright foolish.  Do whatever you can!  Start writing the business plan, talk to local banks, interview other restaurant owners and keep going until quite literally the only thing in your way is capital.  Just because there’s one blockade, doesn’t mean you have to completely stop the operation.In my latest venture, andStartup, I review startup companies around the world and I’m constantly amazed at the courage of some of these entrepreneurs.  Many of these companies are’t even.. companies.  Some are just websites with no idea how to monetize and even though their business concepts may be poor, they get an A for effort.Inertia is a very powerful concept.  Inertia + comfortability = failure.  If you’re comfortable doing what you’re doing, then you have NO reason to change.  Being comfortable in your 9-5 job will not help you start a company, so jolt yourself into action!