I’ve been up since 6:30. Coffee in hand, inbox open, zero new leads.
Another beautiful morning in the life of “being your own boss.”
Let me tell you something nobody talks about when they romanticize entrepreneurship: the silence.
Not the peaceful, zen, I-chose-this kind of silence. The kind where you’ve been putting yourself out there for months, doing everything you’re supposed to do, and the universe just… doesn’t reply.
The LinkedIn Chronicles
So here’s a fun one.
After a month of LinkedIn outbound, crafting messages, personalizing intros, trying not to sound like a bot while also trying not to sound desperate (there’s a sweet spot, and I still haven’t found it), I finally got a bite.
A real one. Or so I thought.
I did the website audit. Sent it over. Professional. Detailed. Useful.
And then he sent me his WhatsApp number.
Great, I thought. This is moving forward.
Except… it wasn’t.
The first message wasn’t about the audit. It wasn’t about his website, or his goals, or his budget.
It was: “So where are you from? When are you coming to the US?”
Not a single word about the work I’d spent hours preparing.
And look, I wish I could say this was the first time.
It’s not.
It doesn’t happen every time, but it happens enough. Enough that I recognize the pattern. You go through weeks of outreach, you finally land a meeting or a conversation, you show up with your expertise, your company, your professionalism, and then you realize the other person only showed up because you’re a woman….really????
One guy actually ended the conversation with: “You looked cuter in your photo.”
Yeah. That happened….
The Part That Actually Hurts
Here’s the thing though. I live in this society. I know this stuff happens. I’m not naive, and honestly? I’ve made my peace with the fact that some percentage of interactions are just going to be like that. It’s infuriating, but it’s not surprising.
The part that actually gets to me is everything else.
It’s the months of effort with nothing to show for it. It’s the planting and planting and planting, and watching nothing grow. I’m doing the outbound on LinkedIn. I’m running email sequences on Instantly. I’m posting three times a week on LinkedIn and Instagram. I’ve restructured my website twice trying to figure out if the message is right. I’ve built a newsletter to warm up leads. I’m managing a pipeline. I’m doing all of it.
And still, silence.
That’s the part that’s draining. Not any single rejection, not any single creepy message, but the cumulative weight of doing everything you can think of and still waking up to an empty inbox.
Nobody talks about this part. The hustle content on LinkedIn shows you the wins, the revenue screenshots, the “I quit my 9-to-5 and never looked back” posts. Nobody posts about the mornings where you stare at your phone and genuinely ask yourself: Why am I doing this?
The Money Trap
I was thinking about this the other day.
If I’d made 10K this month instead of 3K, would I still feel this frustrated? Would I still be questioning the direction? Would I still be lying in bed wondering if this whole thing is a mistake?
Probably not. And that’s kind of messed up, isn’t it?
Because it means my sense of self-worth, my confidence in this path, is directly tied to a number. And I know that’s not how it should work. But let’s be honest, my generation was raised on the equation: more money = more value.
We absorbed it. We breathe it. And when the numbers are low, the doubt creeps in, even when the work is real.
The Saying That Isn’t
I once heard someone attribute this idea to Japanese culture: “If something is too hard, it’s not the right direction.”
It sounded poetic, wise even. The kind of thing you’d see on a Pinterest board next to a photo of a misty bamboo forest.
Except… it’s not actually a Japanese saying.
If anything, Japanese culture says the opposite.
There’s a proverb—ishi no ue ni mo san-nen—which literally means “sit on a stone for three years.” The idea being: stay. Endure. Persistence through discomfort is what eventually warms the stone beneath you.
And then there’s nana korobi ya oki: fall seven times, get up eight.
So no, Japan doesn’t tell you to quit when it’s hard. Japan tells you to sit your ass on the cold stone and wait.
I’m not sure I fully agree with either philosophy, if I’m honest. But I know this: the difficulty I’m experiencing isn’t because I’m going in the wrong direction. It’s because building something from nothing, alone, is just genuinely, objectively hard. And no proverb, Eastern or Western, changes that.
The 9-to-5 Temptation
Every now and then, the thought sneaks in.
What if I just… got a job?
A salary. A structure. Someone else worrying about where the clients come from. Health insurance, maybe. Knowing exactly what hits your bank account at the end of the month.
The security of it is seductive, I won’t lie. Especially on the mornings where I check my emails, see nothing, and have to physically drag myself out of bed to start the day anyway.
But then I remember why I left that world in the first place. And I remember that “security” is just another word for someone else’s terms.
So I close that thought like a browser tab I shouldn’t have opened.
What I Actually Do Every Morning
I want to be clear about something, because I think it matters.
I’m not sitting around waiting for things to happen. Every single day, I wake up and I work. Here’s the unsexy reality of my “solopreneur life”:
LinkedIn outbound. Email outbound via Instantly. Three posts a week on LinkedIn. Three posts a week on Instagram. Website restructuring (again). Newsletter to nurture warm leads. Pipeline management. Client delivery when there is a client. Content creation. Strategy. Admin. Everything.
All of it. Every day. By myself.
And some mornings, I set the alarm, I open my eyes, I look at my phone, and I think: What is the point of all this?
And then I get up anyway.
I make the list. I open the laptop. I start.
Not because I have some grand motivational speech playing in the back of my head. But because… what else am I going to do? Give up? That’s not really an option either. I need to believe that I will get there.
So Here I Am
Still sowing. Still waiting. Still frustrated. Still going.
Because I guess that’s the whole game, isn’t it? You keep showing up until the showing up starts to pay off. Or until you figure out a better way to show up. Or until something finally clicks.
I don’t have a neat conclusion today.
No wise takeaway. No “and that’s when I realized…”
Just this: it’s hard. It’s lonely. It’s frustrating in a way that nobody warns you about. but…
…I keep sowing, convinced that if I plant, something will eventually grow;
I remain here, carrying both the struggle and the hope.
——————————-
Veronica,
Currently in Venice.
“Where the espresso is strong but the leads are weak.“
Work Unplugged 
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