On the menu: sorrow.
Sorrow is a precursor, an amuse-bouche, an appetizer to the main course, which is what we’ve come to the table for. Entrepreneurially speaking.
He: I’m here for the filet.
She: I’m here for the gruyère mac and cheese with prawns.
Insert [what I really want to do with my life, entrepreneurially] for ‘the steak.’
Insert [my dream that I’ve suppressed for so long] for ‘the gruyère mac and cheese’ and [a friggin’ fine paycheck] for the prawns.
{Guess this one’s a fancy restaurant.}
Before we even stepped foot into this place, we feigned to ourselves {and probably to our dining companions} that we were so ready for the main course, the special we saw featured on the online menu. The one we thought about the whole drive over, and even, if we’re honest, the night before this in bed after we’d made our reservation to dine here.
I’ll just eat the main course, we told ourselves. And it’ll be great. I’ll be completely satisfied. It’s all I really want, after all.
But all along, we knew we wouldn’t be able to pass up our favorite appetizer.
Before we can dig in to that much-storied, much-lauded, five star main course, we have to have that darn appetizer.
{In case you’re wondering, it’s a dish that very few diners dislike, although almost no one readily admits to liking it. It’s kind of controversial, like fois gras or, these days, anything made from corn.}
So we run our finger down the menu. No need to go very far down the page. There it is. Sorrow.
Sometimes it’s listed as Grief. Despair. Regret.
Admit it. It may not be something you like other people to catch you noshing on, but you’ve enjoyed your share of Sorrow Plates. Hated yourself for loving every bite.
For some of us, the Sorrow Appetizer is our guiltiest pleasure.
Maybe your Sorrow Appetizer tastes like feeling sorry for yourself:
I never got the chance to live my dream.
Other people kept me from it.
If I wouldn’t have grown up the way I did, I’d be living my dream by this point.
Or maybe your Sorrow Appetizer tastes like grieving the time you lost by filling up on empty calories in the form of entrepreneurial misfires, wrong-fitting career choices, or assignments/consignments taken on because you needed the money. {And if you did — because let’s face, most of us need the money — that wasn’t necessarily wrong. It was just painful or sad in its own needful way.}
Some of us fill up too much on the appetizer. We binge on it until there’s no room left for the main meal. {Kinda like the breadsticks at Olive Garden, eh?}
And then — then, there are those of us who want to skip right to dessert: enjoying the spoils of a well-crafted business model before we’ve put in any work at all, then decrying entrepreneurship in general or our own gifts in particular when we find out it doesn’t work that way.
Both of these dining behaviors are problematic. {But the dessert problem is another post.}
But hey, listen: there’s a good reason the Sorrow Appetizer is on the menu at all. {Big Chef knows a thing or two about us.}
It primes the palate to receive. Wakes up our senses, especially a sleeping appetite. Tides us over if the kitchen is slow. Makes us feel that at the end of the meal, we’ve had enough. We weren’t totally starving when we lifted our forks for the main course, because there’s a bit of something already in there.
There’s taste memory. Sorrow is on our breath and it mingles with the flavors of the main course.
Some diners, then, are neurotic. They get up after the Sorrow Appetizer and rush off to the restroom, angling for the mirror over the sink to neurotically floss out every last herb and speck of seasoning. I didn’t eat that. I’ve never felt that.
Bottom line: they don’t want anyone to know that they prime themselves on such plates. It’s quite indulgent.
But they do. We all do.
It’s kind of, you know, the way we humans do things.
Have you been eating a neverending Sorrow Appetizer instead of the meat-and-potatoes of your entrepreneurial dream?
With every bite, are you telling yourself that It can’t be done, or that you can’t do it?
As you chase the last crumbs of the Sorrow Appetizer around the plate with your fork, are you telling yourself that you’re a has-been, and thinking that what you’ve had was never the right thing to begin with?
If so, look up from your small plate. Look around.
There’s a whole restaurant full of diners eating the same course you are.
Now, how do we get past the necessary Sorrow Appetizer — grieving for the dreams we lost along the way, resentment at the other choices we made {often made for other people, not for us}, fear that we may never see our dream come to fruition on this earth — and tell the waitstaff, “Yes, please. I’m ready for my entrée. Bring it out. Bring it on.”
You tell me. If you’ve been eating the Sorrow Appetizer, too, I want to hear about it. Let’s dine, darling.
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