An Entrepreneur without a Company - Are We Only as Good as our Most Recent Accomplishment?

A few years ago, one of my college classmates posted about winning their first Emmy, and it was accompanied by a Facebook comment from one of our professors stating: "Well done. In an industry where you are just as good as your most recent project, this is an accomplishment to cherish." That phrase struck me - you are only as good as your most recent accomplishment? I immediately thought of that as a tough way to live, having to constantly perform. 

Since selling Fotoskribe and becoming an entrepreneur without a company, it now resonates with me in a way that it didn't at that time. When you create something and you go through the life cycles of that thing, you realize that some people are better at different portions of the life cycle than others. I'm a beginner. I like to start things. I like to scale them, but then once they're in that middle-age company size and really growing/scaling, those are where my skills aren't put to the best use, or perhaps I just don't get as much enjoyment as the all-encompassing beginning stages. I can know understand that I crave the heady parts of the initial idea, where it's all you think about for a period of time, and then it gets legs and it moves up and on.

I sold my company in 2017, and I've just started really sharing my writings publicly again. I don't have a product to sell yet. I haven't monetized. It's really interesting when I go to conferences or when I go to entrepreneur meetings or networking events and they say, "Who are you?" and I think, I don't know.

I'm an entrepreneur without a company right now, but that doesn't mean that I don't still have the same set of skill sets. As a matter of fact, I've gone through a full business life cycle. I've started something and passed it off and seen what that feels like and learned a lot of things that I would do the same way and a lot of things I would do differently.

What does that mean in a world where we're only as good as our last project? Who are we? How does one write an “About Me” page or the “About” page for companies?

Maybe we should find a different way to judge ourselves as creatives, as people who start things, who make things, who bring things into the world. Maybe we're only as good as where we are now, and maybe you can't put a qualifying identifier on that.

(photo on main page by Jazmin Quaynor on Unsplash)