Author: Henry Murphy

A lot of people jump into business because they hear the glory stories.

They hear how easy it is.

They see the highlight reels.

Entrepreneurship is not for the faint of heart.

And I know you’ve heard that before.

But the reason it’s not for the faint of heart is because it makes you become a different version of yourself.

Not the version of yourself that just has to show up, do an eight-hour day, and go home.

The version of yourself that builds the whole thing.

The version of yourself that pushes through adversity when challenges come up.

The version of yourself that makes you innovate when there’s no money coming in.

That’s a different type of endurance.

And it means having faith when it looks like nothing is working.

If you haven’t been doing this for a while, I want to encourage you.

I want to point quickly at two stories.

Three Feet from Gold.

There’s a story about a man who was digging for gold.

He found gold, invested more money, and then the vein of gold disappeared.

He quit.

He sold the equipment to a junk dealer.

The junk dealer brought in an engineer who discovered that the gold vein was only three feet away from where the man stopped digging.

Three feet.

The other story I want to point to is Florence Chadwick.

She had already swum the English Channel.

Then she attempted to swim from Catalina Island to the California coast.

She swam for almost 16 hours, but there was so much fog that she couldn’t see the shore.

She stopped.

When she got out of the water, she found out she was only about a half-mile from the coast.

She was that close.

Two months later, she tried again.

The fog was there again.

But this time, she knew the shore was there even though she couldn’t see it.

And she made it.

That’s why no one’s journey is the same.

And this is why it’s important to be around like-minded people.

Because although everyone around you might love you, they don’t necessarily understand what you’re pursuing.

They don’t understand the internal struggle.

Keep showing up.

Keep putting in the work.

Because the funny thing about entrepreneurship is you never know what’s going to make it pop off.

You could literally be one repost away.

I’m sitting on the steps surrounded by greenery, and it’s about 9:30 AM in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.

It’s 86°, but it’s overcast, and there’s a very cool, crisp breeze.

I started thinking about how everything belongs to God.

It doesn’t matter where I’m at.

He is Lord.

He owns everything.

I never traveled much when I was younger.

Living in Savannah, Georgia, when I finally moved to Atlanta, I was 33 years old.

The typical Jacksonville, Orlando, Florida run, maybe Maryland or South Carolina—that was pretty much it.

I was a Georgia boy.

It kind of reminds me of that line in the movie ATL where they say, “He ATL for real. Never been outside of 285.”

However, I wasn’t proud of it.

I actually wanted to see more of everything.

And when I became an entrepreneur, I got that opportunity.

I’ve been to almost every state in America and many, many cities within each state.

And I got to do it doing what I love—selling clothing and traveling with artists.

It was amazing.

I remember having a conversation with my wife about moving to California, and I told her, God is God no matter where we are.

And that’s true, even being halfway across the world from everything that I know.

We actually picked Southeast Asia so that we could travel to Thailand, Manila, Malaysia, Bali, Taiwan.

It’s so much more than that.

Who knows what’s next?

I definitely have some places in Africa I want to go.

However, I’m not in a rush.

I just want new experiences.

I want to stay in a place for a while.

Soak it up.

Understand the culture.

Learn new languages.

I didn’t become an entrepreneur until I was 38.

And then I realized…

It is never too late to do anything.

If we ever look in the mirror and be honest with ourselves, the only thing stopping us is us.

Everything is just a decision.

We have to decide, and we have to cut away all other choices.

Life is to be lived.

So start living it.

A lot of times, creativity is birthed in us when we’re young.

And we know it.

We have this idea of what we want to be and who we want to become.

For many of us, it takes decades.

But a lot of times, when we look back, we can see little signs along the way.

Once you get it, you got it.

Then you finally get up the nerve to invest in yourself, and you start doing the thing.

There’s a lot of pressure that comes with starting a business because it actually goes against everything that we were taught in school.

But let’s just say you make it past all of that, and you get there.

You actually start a business.

You need someone around you to encourage you because it gets hard.

And most of the time, if we don’t have a coach or mentor, then we are doing it alone.

Entrepreneurship is already a lonely journey, even with those things.

And let’s say you have someone in your life that tells you you can’t do something.

They tell you that you will not make it.

Depending on how close they are to you, it can really kill your motivation.

They can kill your productivity.

And a lot of people quit here because they don’t have support.

And I don’t care who it is—your mama, your daddy, your cousin, your grandma, your husband, your wife.

Nobody gets to tell you that you can’t do what God put you here to do.

I wanna tell you to use that as fuel.

Let them tell you that you can’t.

Every time you hear that, something inside you should have this burning fire to keep going.

To be relentless.

There should be no quitting in you.

I’m here to tell you that you can.

I’m here to tell you that that business can be profitable.

I’m here to tell you that you can change your life and the lives of your children.

I’m here to tell you that you can continue to learn new skills.

I’m here to tell you that you can breakthrough the barriers.

Never let anyone tell you that you can’t.

I was sitting down with a good friend of mine, and we were just catching up before I moved to Southeast Asia.

We were both talking about what’s next in our lives, and he has always been a creative.

He has a very good job, but that creative side of him comes up more than he probably cares to admit.

It’s not a surprise to hear that from anyone because the first thing that God told us about Himself was that He was a Creator.

He made us to create.

He made us to solve problems and serve people.

Okay, let me not lose my focus. 😂

He was talking himself out of working on some concepts for design because he felt like the market was oversaturated.

I told him, you’re looking at it like a slice of pie instead of a garden like God intended us to look at it.

Every creation is a seed, and those seeds reproduce after themselves, just like fruit.

There’s no limit.

There are only a certain amount of slices in the pie.

Once the pie is gone, that’s it.

This type of thinking is a scarcity mindset.

He shouldn’t be ashamed of it unless he chooses to stay there.

We have the opportunity to think more abundantly and to live more abundantly.

The question is, what are you going to believe?

Faith and doubt are both beliefs.

Doubt is an undesirable outcome.

Faith is a desirable outcome.

I would always lean toward the desirable outcome.

If you have an idea and there’s a market for it, then your duty is to take it to the market and let the market decide.

The year was 2009, and my wife said, “I’ll be back.”

I said, “Where are you going?”

She said, “I’m gonna get a passport.”

I said, “I want a passport too.”

Ten years passed by, and we didn’t travel anywhere.

So we renewed our passports again in 2019.

By the time 2019 came, we had already been empty nesters for seven years.

Nothing was stopping us from traveling.

We just never pulled the trigger.

We never pursued it.

We made the big decision to move to California, and I think hopping across the country prepared us to hop across the world.

There were some underlying things going on between getting those two passports.

My wife needed two new hips, and she got those.

Then I was diagnosed as legally blind in 2021.

That was a big shift for me.

Arie being born definitely affected me too.

There was something about just packing up and leaving at one time that felt different.

My wife started talking about traveling out of the country, and I said to myself:

“What’s stopping us now?”

Since we started talking about it, I knew two things were important.

My wife and I needed to be in agreement.

And if the Lord wills, then we will go.

I don’t know how complicated it needed to be.

If the Lord isn’t stopping us, and my wife and I are in agreement, then that’s a green light.

We just needed to figure out where we wanted to go, or at least where we wanted to start, and then map everything else out from there.

We talked about putting our stuff in storage.

But then we were like, why carry a bill?

Let’s just sell everything.

And that’s what we did.

We already live pretty minimalistic.

I honestly think that’s the first step—to learn to live on less than what you need.

Also, I’ve been an entrepreneur since 2011, and I know how to make money online.

So what made me take that risk?

It didn’t seem like a risk to me.

It seemed more like a decision.

I think the main thing I need to get through my head is that we’re going somewhere we’ve never been.

It’s a different culture.

They do things differently.

So don’t go in there thinking you know everything.

Go in there open.

Be willing to learn.

But then there’s a pessimistic part of me that starts thinking:

“What can go wrong?”

And when I started thinking about that, I realized something.

It can go wrong in America, and it can go wrong in a different country.

But what happens when things go wrong?

We find a way to solve it.

That’s what we’ve always done.

We realized we wanted new memories.

We wanted new experiences.

And that’s why we sold everything and moved to another country.

My wife and I have been talking about moving out of the country one day for a while.

Many people might think it was all of a sudden, but it was more of a “What are we waiting for?” moment.

It seems like as soon as we bought those tickets, things started happening.

Although I wasn’t shocked, I was kind of shocked at how it was showing up every day.

I took this picture with my Meta Glasses while I was sitting in a wheelchair in the emergency room.

You can’t see my face.

You can see the wheelchair, the wristband they put on me at the hospital, my Apple Watch, and my shoes.

I was trying to keep my shoulder as still as possible because I was in excruciating pain.

And this was happening right in the middle of us clearing out our house and preparing to leave the country.

Talk about a distraction.

We had a checklist, and I felt like we were going down that checklist pretty smooth.

Then one hiccup after another.

When something was free, my mistake made it cost money.

Needed more things.

Needed more money.

I could go on and on.

However, there were a lot of good things too.

But this is one thing I learned from the Word of God:

Distraction follows intention.

As soon as you decide, no matter what it is, that you’re going to be intentional in life, distraction will come.

It’s not something that you run from.

It’s something that you let build you.

Build your character.

Build your resilience.

In my mind, I was not going to let a 13-hour day—yes, a whole shift at a hospital—stop me from leaving the country.

Whatever you say you’re going to do, just do it.

I think, yes, you should give it thought, but don’t overthink it.

Yes, I think you should plan it, but don’t over-plan it.

Make a decision.

Which basically means to cut away all of the choices.

Then go do the thing.

Because once you make the decision to be intentional, you should expect distraction to show up.

Don’t let it stop you.

I remember when I first got my office, I spent a lot of time just twiddling my thumbs, watching a Marvel movie and drinking coffee.

I was a hard worker, but I didn’t have a schedule. Therefore, I was never as productive as I could’ve been.

I didn’t really have a daily routine.

If a project needed to be done, I would work on that. But outside of that, I didn’t have 3 to 4 things that I worked on consistently.

When I look back, I think about how much further I could’ve been if I was just a little bit more productive.

But my schedule was trash. 😂

You have to ask yourself, what is the overall goal that you’re trying to achieve?

Let’s use social media for example because it’s the engine that drives the business.

If you want to show up 7–10 times per week, then you have to have certain days that you do certain things.

Let’s make it simple.

What topics are you going to cover this week?

Those need to be outlined before you ever hit that record button, so set a day for that.

What day or days are you going to record the content?

Then what day or days are you going to edit the content?

And what days are you going to publish the content?

You might have other goals that you want to hit that week, but they have to have a place on your schedule.

Because if you approach entrepreneurship aimlessly, you’re never going to hit anything.

And I’m talking about 3 to 4 things per day.

Not 15.

Not 20.

3 to 4 things that actually matter.

If you follow this for everything that you have to do, you will become a better action taker.

And therefore, you’ll get better results over time.

Your schedule matters.

I love ambitious entrepreneurs. I am one myself.

I’m also a very optimistic person, and so when I’m talking to clothing brand founders, I try to set expectations.

I don’t set them because I don’t believe in what they’re doing.

I set them because I know there’s a learning curve to everything.

No matter what business you’re trying to build, systems are required. Infrastructure is required. Mindset is required. And selling is required.

Depending on where you are in life and how you’re built, some of these things you might breeze through pretty fast.

But that’s not the case for everybody.

For instance, mindset might take you six months just to get a grip on it and start believing in yourself.

And that doesn’t take away from who you are.

You might be amazing at what you do, but if you don’t believe it, then none of it matters.

Most of the time when we first start a business, we have to load up our skill set so we have different things in our toolset.

We don’t always have the money upfront to hire people to do everything for us.

So we might have to learn enough to get some understanding, get the needle moving, and then eventually bring someone in to do that job and take it off our plate.

All of these things are part of the learning curve.

And depending on the person, that learning curve might take longer for some and shorter for others.

So don’t compare your journey.

Approach entrepreneurship with enthusiasm, optimism, and humility.

Because entrepreneurship takes before it gives.

Our ultimate purpose is to love God and serve people.

But if you actually have an idea of what you’re supposed to do in life and how you’re supposed to serve people, you’re gonna ask God sometimes:

“What are You doing?”

“Where are You?”

When I was young in the faith, I used to get excited about hearing what God was going to do in my life.

That changed as I grew in the faith.

Not because I wasn’t excited about what was next, but because I realized there was going to be a time when I had to become the person who could actually do the thing.

A time of discipline.

A time of disappointment.

I love the Bible because it gives us patterns.

Look at David.

God told David he was going to be king.

But look at what David had to go through before he actually became king.

That’s a pattern.

Look at Joseph.

God revealed to Joseph what He was going to do through him.

Then Joseph got sold into slavery.

Then he got thrown into prison.

It took a while before he became Prime Minister of Egypt.

He had to go through some hard seasons to become the person who could actually do the thing.

You and I are no different.

So if you’re working on a business and it doesn’t seem like anything is happening right now, please don’t think you can skip becoming.

This is the time to lean in.

Depend on God more.

Spend time in His Word.

Get help with what you’re building.

Educate yourself.

Invest in yourself.

Because whatever God called you to, He will give you the grace to accomplish that very thing.

Don’t skip becoming.