#012

I am BACK. (I THINK). 

Last week was definitely a week.

I had a medical emergency, and my health decided to fail me at what was probably the least convenient moment possible. So, my week was what one would call horrible. Not particularly productive, not particularly enjoyable, and definitely not something I would voluntarily repeat.

But, of course, life doesn't exactly pause when you're having a difficult week.

The International AI Startup Challenge started, and I am yet to receive an answer from any of the organizations I contacted regarding student interviews for customer discovery.

So I did what any person with common sense would do: change the entire startup. Start again from zero.

Yes. You read that correctly.

With six weeks left, I have decided that the best course of action is to reconsider the entire idea and potentially build something completely different. The clock is ticking, the deadline is approaching, and the six weeks I have left are looking at me like I'm absolutely insane.

Frankly, I don't see another solution.

I could spend the remaining time trying to convince myself that my original idea is worth pursuing, even though my customer discovery isn't giving me the evidence I need. Or I could accept that something isn't working and try to find something that does.

This is very much a "trust the process" situation.

I'm just having a little trouble trusting it.

And perhaps that's the most frustrating part of entrepreneurship. You can spend hours researching, planning, building, emailing people, and trying to make something happen, only to discover that you might have been asking the wrong questions all along.

Sometimes, the hardest part isn't building something. It's admitting that you might need to start over.

Anyway, moving on.

This past week, I have doubted EVERYTHING.

And I mean every single thing.

My grades. Music school. My projects. My decisions. My failures (I have a lot of those). Even things I was previously quite confident about.

Suddenly, I find myself crying more than I ever did when I was intellectually worse off.

And that is a rather strange realization.

Last year, I was struggling academically much more than I am now. I was working with a completely different mindset, and my grades reflected that. This year, I've made significant changes. I've become more disciplined, stopped relying on AI to do my homework, started taking responsibility for my own learning, and generally tried to become a better student.

And yet, somehow, I seem to be crying considerably more.

I don't think I had quite anticipated that improving academically wouldn't necessarily make everything else easier.

Perhaps I have become so accustomed to measuring my progress through what I accomplish that I don't really know what to do with myself when things aren't going according to plan.

Because there is always something.

School, for example.

Writing this, I realize just how constant everything has become. Tomorrow, I have a very important French test. On Tuesday, I have a technology theory test AND an English test. Then, on Friday, I have a science test.

And that's just this week.

It's constant. Tests, all the time. We had tests during the second week of school, and they've been coming nonstop ever since.

Sometimes I genuinely wonder whether we are supposed to have a life outside of school.

Everyone goes through this, right?

I suppose this is part of growing up, although I would appreciate it if someone could provide a slightly less exhausting version.

Then there's everything outside school.

Music school, where I'm learning to develop a completely different skill set. My projects, which always seem to involve more work than I initially anticipated. S.H.E., which I still want to see grow into something meaningful. My ambitions, which, unfortunately, do not seem to have an off switch.

I have so many things I want to do.

I want to build things. I want to learn. I want to travel, meet people, establish connections, and eventually find myself in rooms where I can have conversations with people who are working on things I care about.

I want to go to New York. I want to expand my projects beyond Tunisia. I want to create opportunities instead of waiting for them to appear.

And sometimes, the distance between where I am and where I want to be feels enormous.

I think that's what makes particularly difficult weeks so frustrating. It's not necessarily that nothing is happening. It's that I can see so many things I want to happen, and I cannot make all of them happen immediately.

I'm pretty sure my fuel at the moment is:

"Work so hard that success is the only possible outcome."

Which is probably not the healthiest motivational philosophy ever invented, but here we are.

I am trying to remind myself that a difficult week doesn't erase the progress of the previous months. One failed startup idea doesn't make me a bad founder. A disappointing response rate doesn't mean nobody needs what I'm trying to build. A difficult test doesn't invalidate an entire semester of work.

And a medical emergency is not a personal failure. Apparently, my body is allowed to have opinions about my schedule. How inconvenient.

I think I have spent so much time trying to become the person I want to be that I sometimes forget that becoming that person is going to involve a few rather unpleasant chapters.

Not every week is going to be a breakthrough. Not every project is going to work. Not every email is going to receive an answer. Not every decision is going to be the right one.

And I suppose learning to deal with that is also part of the process.

I don't have everything figured out. I don't even have my startup figured out, which is particularly funny considering the circumstances.

But I am still trying to make things happen.

And perhaps that's enough for this week.

Okay, great. I think I'm healed.

Let's get back to work.