The leap may seem physical, but it's mostly mental. In your head you don't know if it's the right time to jump into being an entrepreneur. What about the mortgage, the family and the bills? And how do you deal with the fear? How do you stay steadfast to your vision? And what about focus? These are the questions that spin in your head over and over again. This episode isn't an answer to your question. No one can answer the questions, but you. However, it helps you understand how to keep true to your vision, how to keep your focus in a distracted world. And then, how to take that leap. ----------------------------- Today I sat down to install one of my most-used programs: Dragon Naturally Speaking. I use Dragon a lot in the membership site, on our courses and also for e-mail. So when I got a notification that a newer version of Dragon was available, I paid my $99, downloaded the software and started to install it. Except it wouldn’t install The software informed me I needed to upgrade from Yosemite to El Capitan —which is the Mac’s current operating system. And therein lay the problem. All my computers were humming nicely on Yosemite, and there seemed no need to rock the boat and install a new operating system. At least if I were having some trouble with the existing system, it would be worth the trouble, but I was doing just fine. Then along came this new version of Dragon and it was forcing me to do something that involved a whole lot of risk. When you’re in a job, it’s like living in Yosemite land It’s not the best thing ever and you know there’s a world of entrepreneurship you’d rather explore. But it’s safe in Yosemite-land so why make the leap into the unknown? And how do you know things will work out anyway? You don’t. That’s the whole point of being an entrepreneur. You have no clue if or when things will work out. The only thing you know for sure is that change is happening. That the Dragon wants to be let loose in your world and you’re holding back. I understand there’s a huge difference between taking a leap from a job into the world of business. I know that the fear is a lot greater when you have a family, a mortgage, and bills to pay. Yet, there comes a time when your hand seems to be forced. You can stay where you are, or you can take the leap. In this series we deal with three recurring questions 1) Managing the fear 2) Keeping the vision strong 3) Focus—And why you need a hatchet person Part 1: Managing the Fear I hated my job as a web designer. I’d just immigrated to Auckland, New Zealand in Feb 2000 and my priority was to find a job. Compared with India, where I came from, Auckland was terribly expensive. And anyway, I couldn’t see myself starting up in business right away. To my utter amazement, I found a job that was going to pay me $50,000 a year to build websites. By the second day, I was ready to quit. My wife, Renuka, wasn’t so sure To get a job that was reasonably well-paying was not an easy task. At the time she was still in India, and she asked me to hang on until she showed up in the following month and got a job of her own. “Then you can quit your job if you like, ” she told me. However, things don’t exactly pan out the way we imagine When Renuka got to New Zealand, she found it hard to find a job that fit her position. For the next few month, she bounced between temporary jobs and at least at the time, my job was the one that paid the bills—and the mortgage. Barely three months after we entered the country, we bought ourselves a house and had a mortgage of $200k. The week after we bought the house, I was made redundant. The fat, it seems, was in the proverbial fire. What I experienced was a no-choice situation It wasn’t entirely no-choice. I could have clambered back into the job market and got myself another job. After all, I was pretty good at Photoshop, illustration and had a decent track record in copywriting. Instead, I decided to say goodbye to the workplace once and for all. Put yourself in