Trying to get a new venture off the ground can be lonely at first.

This thing is so new that you barely believe in it. How are you going to get someone else to come along for the ride?

You may have had some life experiences that reinforce the narratives we hear all around us:

“You just can’t find good help.”

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A friend of mine, a stay-at-home mom, is locked into a perpetual battle with her career-oriented sister-in-law.

“You’re so lucky that you were able to stay home,” says the sister-in-law. “We never could have afforded it.”

My friend seethed. “It wasn’t luck!” she told me. “We sacrificed. She could have, too.”

She wants her sister-in-law to acknowledge the nobility of her choice to stay home with her kids. The rightness of it.

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One of my biggest, stupidest problems is that I really struggle to make meals for myself.

For a long time, I thought it was laziness. But I am a hard worker in many areas of my life. If anything, it seemed to have more to do with weak planning and a lack of prioritization.

While it’s been fun having a wide array of culinary choices at my disposal in the fabulous Atlanta restaurant scene over the past few months (plus, living alone so that I could eat whatever I wanted, whenever I wanted), I finally got to the point that I didn’t want to eat out anymore.

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A leader I know is way too busy to do all of the stuff she's doing.

Still, she wants to continue to perform a certain administrative task that takes a few hours per week.

"That stuff is fun and easy for me," she said. "I enjoy it."

I understand that — I do that. Most of us do.

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When I was in my early twenties, I took a job teaching public school for a very low salary.

Frankly, I could have made more waiting tables, which was the other skill set I possessed.

The challenge was that I’d be working in an area with a shortage of affordable housing. The additional challenge was that I was a bit of a snob who had grown up on the coast and wanted to stay there. I didn’t want to move inland, far from my family (and for that matter, my job). What was I going to do?

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