Recommended: The Dip

April 14th, 2009

I spent about an hour and a half on a conference call last week for a woman who was trying to decide whether to keep her web-based business open, transform it into something else, or close it altogether and move on. The call had been put together by a blogger/social networking consultant/operator of successful web-based community (busy gal!) and included a publicist, two other entrepreneurs, a couple of other smart women with different career paths, and myself, initially wearing my entrepreneur hat.

Though most of us did not know the business owner, we were all familiar with her business and were fans of the idea, and we’d been prepped as to what the problem was. We all quickly dove in, discussing the issue, throwing out ideas on how to overcome it or work around it, good ideas, but of course, ideas which involved time and energy and, in some cases, financial investment.

To each idea, the owner of the business tiredly informed us that she’d already tried some version of the solution being proposed. Her tone started to feel familiar to me, one I sometimes heard when initially meeting with Career Rutbuster clients. Exhaustion, disillusionment… surrender.

I put on my career consultant hat at that point and and gently said, “You sound pretty down about the the whole thing.” A small voice answered back, “Yes.” Fighting emotion.

It had become clear to me that this entrepreneur was not in a place to take another passionate stab at making her business model work. She was just too tired, too down. “How would you feel if I suggested taking a break from it, doing something else for a while… maybe three months?” I asked.

The rest of the conversation was mostly about how she couldn’t quit, she’d put too much into it, she was too old to admit defeat and start new with something else. And no matter how many times we reassured her that we were just talking about taking a break, putting the business on hold (something that actually was possible in her case), she kept coming back to the same concept: FAILURE.

You see, this woman was facing The Dip. The Dip, as defined by Seth Godin in his aptly titled book, is either a temporary setback that you will overcome if you keep pushing or it’s a Cul-de-Sac, which will never get better no matter how hard you try. Godin’s belief is that winners quit fast and quit often, and quit without guilt– until they commit to beating the right Dip for the right reasons.

I have no idea whether the business owner on the conference call is experiencing a temporary Dip she could/should overcome in order to hit the big time and make her business thrive, or whether it’s a dead end she should walk away from on the way to something else.

All I knew when I was on that call– and YES, I did recommend the book to her (and now that I think about it, should probably remind her of)– was that she was not in a place to answer that question for herself.

The idea of walking away from her business- or even making it into something else which was not the exact model she had been working on for the past few years- was the equivalent of admitting defeat. And my point- which was Godin’s point- is that some Dips should not be overcome. They are not failures- they are steps along the way to finding that something that will work, whether it is a business or a job or a political movement.

So if you are finding yourself in a Dip these days and trying to make sense of it and decide your next move, check out The Dip.

Related posts:

1. Recommended: Secrets of Six-Figure Women

Filed under: Recommended, mid-career professionals

Tags: career advice, seth godin, the dip