Curtis McHale has some words of wisdom when it comes to deciding to work towards something more than just a 9 to 5 job.

The things we want are hard, we may fail.

That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t bother trying.

— Good Things Are Hard and Have High Failure Rates, We Should Still Try

I enjoyed working for myself. In faact I loved working for myself. But it came with a risk. The risk was that I focused on long term contracts with fewer clients, so while the long term looked good, I found it difficult to maintain that run of long term client work. Eventually I found myself unable to sustain the work and I started looking for full-time work.

Now, two years later, I’m building a product on the side for a market that I have some knowledge of. There’s no guarantee that my product will be a success though.

Every week I spend a half hour going through some RSS feeds and a Twitter list of organisations that are the target market for my product and a Twitter list of competitors. The market is healthy and there’s plenty of worldwide opportunities for my product, but there are times when I doubt myself and I think the product will fail to take off.

It usually lasts for a couple of days and then I find myself shaking off the thoughts of risk and I through myself into the backlog of work I have to do for the product.

I have to at least give it a try.