AriKoinuma.com

For the last 4-5 months, I’ve been working on developing my business plan.  I finished it, presented it to a family member to see if he’ll invest some money into it.  He said the amount was not a problem, but he thought I was making a mistake — the move to start my business was too risky, given my financial resource, the current economic climate, and the unproven nature of my proposition.  He thought that while the money I was asking for was not a problem to him, by withdrawing his financial support, he wanted to discourage me from moving forward with this erroneous decision.  He said that I can come to him when the business ideas are a little more tested and the economy is a little better, and then he’ll be happy to support me.

I thanked him for his opinion, and thought about what he said.

I’ve been working as a web developer for the past year.  I was hired with a one-year contract with the intention to make me a permanent employee.  But that plan was scrapped because of the current recession.

While I was working, I was testing the waters on professional blogging, and developing my business plan.  This job, in a lot of ways, was the last straw for me.  It’s a terrific job at a terrific company.  I have a fabulous private office and respect of all my colleagues.  For the first 3 months or so, I was so happy here that I thought perhaps I was to just pursue a career here.  Then things went sour — nothing really major happened, but after the initial learning and discovery period of the new job ended, I was back to the same old doldrums.  I felt disillusioned.  If a job this good cannot satisfy me, then I really have no choice but go off on my own.

Not that my entrepreneurial ambition was something new.  I’ve wanted to make music for a living ever since I was 17.  I’ve spent the last 18 years trying to figure out in what form I could do that.  It’s been a lot of dead ends and beating my head on walls, and each time I’d question myself — maybe I’m not meant to do this — only to come back to that same desire after a while and trying a different angle, a new approach at it.

Then this weekend, my wife and I were talking.  She’s been reading books on intuition, and she shared with me that her body experiences conflict and stress when she has an intuition about what to do but not strong enough to go with it.

Then we went on to discuss the truth of who we are.  She and I do a lot of hiding and telling different, partial versions of the truth.  We’re both trying to protect the truth when we’re with people with whom we feel vulnerable.  I know, for example, that I don’t discuss my music with most people at my employer.  It’s not that I think everybody else is malicious and cynical.  But when I’m at a day job, I feel that it’s more appropriate to pretend that my job is my real career, and that if I mention music at all, I make it sound as if it’s a casual pursuit, a mere hobby.  Even on my own personal growth blog, I didn’t really mention my music a whole lot in the beginning.

Why?  Because I was afraid — I was protecting my truth of who I am from being challenged, because fundamentally, there’s no rhyme or reason for who I am.  There is no logic and no justification for wanting to do what I want. I can’t explain to you why I love making music so much. I can’t explain to you why I want to make it my livelihood, when so many other people desire to but fail to do so.   I have no justification — no proof that I am exceptionally talented or that people desire what I do enough to pay me.  And logically speaking, the chance of me failing or not being able to make it my livelihood is so high.  So I hid the truth.  I’ve never given myself full permission to go for it.

The truth is that I want to make music. All the business plans and trying to borrow money and everything else, I was doing to justify my truth. And so far all attempts to do so have failed.

I’ve always been an intuitive person.  There are times when my fear and other strong emotions cloud and confuse my “gut” feeling, but they are more of exceptions than norm.  I always know what I’m supposed to do.  I consider my intuition my hotline to God.  But despite believing that, I used to ignore it most of the time.  Why? Because I cannot justify it with reason.  If I make an intuitive decision, and if someone asks me why I did it, I wouldn’t be able to explain why.  My intuition never made any sense to me. I’ve made efforts to be better in the last 2-3 years, but my batting average is still like 50%.

I don’t know about you, but I feel that we live in a deeply left-brained world.  We’re supposed to plan, analyze, prove, and maximize based on mathematical logic.  It’s not efficient otherwise, it’s not predictable, it’s not explicable.

The next morning, I woke up very early and pondered our discussion.  It felt like sky was opening up, but I also felt deeply unsettled and scared.  Over the years, I’ve diligently purged a lot of my fears.  I have felt that I was getting close to a major break through, and I knew this was it.  But it was terrifying.

Then I had a hunch to go check my Google Reader.  I did, and I ran into this post.

There was no doubt in my mind.  I knew what I needed to do.

I’m going to make music.

I don’t have the financial support I sought with my business plan.  And according to my own plan, there’s no way I can start making enough profit to stay afloat within 3-4 months, when our savings will run out.  I don’t know how this is going to work out.  I don’t know how it can.

But I’m going to stop looking for a new job, rent a studio and start making music.  Because my intuition tells me to do so.  And for no other reason.

I told my decision to my wife.  She said, “OK.  Good luck.” 

I am an intuitive person, always have been.  And that day, I decided to surrender to my intuition.  I will no longer argue with it or resist it.  I will stop looking for justification, or reasons why.   I’m just going to do it.

I’m going to be me, because this is who I am. No other reason.