The cost of entry

The cost for starting Pivot Adventure was enormous. We didn’t have a map to follow. No step-by-step set of instructions. No guru to converse with.

It required countless hours of research, so much emotional labor and a lot of money for someone like me to get it off the ground. Add in the pandemic and overcoming the sheer number of mistakes I made for starting a business for the first time, it almost didn’t work.

Yet, I hear quite often from people how much they wanted to start something like that.

So why? Why didn’t they do it?

Because of the barrier to entry.

Sometimes the cost is small like buying a ticket for a roller coaster.

Sometimes the price is large like doing 9 years of medical school to become a doctor.

The larger the barrier of entry is the more we want a guarantee that something is going to work.

Yet, there is no guarantee. There is no genie coming out of the lamp to fix things. No one has a crystal to know what the future holds. And you certainly are not going to win the lottery.

So we hesitate. Our western mindset says, “If this won’t work, why should I commit?”

The way around this is simple but hard to apply.

Ask yourself, “If this were to fail, will I still be glad that I did it?”

If not, then pick something else. And if you have the guts to say YES! (an emphatic yes), if this is something your soul must pursue, then go.

There is no guarantee that what you pursue will also provide a living. There is no guarantee that just because you put ten thousand hours into something that you are now entitled for people to notice. (In fact, 99.99999% of the people won’t.)

But if you can change one person, just one, then you’re on your way to making a splash.