3 hard-earned mindset skills from 25 years building alone

The timeless mindset tools that matter more than hacks

Starting as a solopreneur is never easy. When I began, the internet barely existed. No playbooks, no gurus, no “solopreneur” buzzword.

That made the path lonelier—but it also spared me from information overload. What I learned instead were three mindset skills that matter more now than ever.

1. Feel the fear and do it anyway

The antidote to fear is action. I learned that the hard way.

At 23, I quit my corporate job, moved abroad, and blew a chunk of my savings on a failed franchise.

No safety net. No support network. Paralysis wasn’t an option, so I kept moving.

Step by shaky step, I found the courage to freelance in a field I barely knew. That leap eventually let me work across ten countries.

Fear doesn’t disappear. It dissolves when you move through it.

Around then, I read Susan Jeffers’ Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. It floored me. If I’d read it earlier, I might have saved myself a lot of grief.

Read it now, before you’re stuck in a paralyzingly scary moment. It’s an ’80s classic that never goes out of style, like Purple Rain.

2. Dare to be the black sheep

If you leap, people will call you reckless. Subtler digs hurt more: friends joked I was “doing nothing,” classmates muttered about wasted degrees.

Books like Wayne Dyer’s Your Erroneous Zones and, decades later, Mark Manson’s The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck* taught me the same lesson: freedom never comes from consensus.

3. Do it without permission

Today people say credentials don’t matter anymore. But they never really did. The obstacle is always imposter syndrome. Another ever-green 80’s classic, Maxwell Maltz’s Psycho-Cybernetics, showed me how to reprogram self-image.

His technique was simple but profound: enter a relaxed, meditative state and vividly imagine yourself as the person you want to become. Over time, the subconscious accepts that image as reality, and you begin to act accordingly.

The Master Practice

Each of these skills comes back to one practice: meditation. I learned young through Silva Mind Control and embarked on a meditation journey that continues to this day, but you don’t need an early start.

Meditation is the foundation of Maxwell Maltz’s techniques, but the truth is that meditation is not only effective for dispelling impostor syndrome and our attachment to credentials.

Meditation is as effective for gracefully managing the fear of the unknown, and immunizing you against what others think of you.

When you meditate, you become content with who you are. Weirdly enough, that alone makes it easier to change for the better.

But when you add imagination, you’re not just running a business. You’re shaping reality itself.

Start today if you still haven’t. Start today, even if you don’t want to be a solopreneur.