Hard Earned Advice for Life and Business

You can't count on anyone, No One Is Coming to help you

Along your journey, most things are going to be hard. Some things will come easily. Other things will suck so badly that they make you question why you ever started.

You’ll get angry. You’ll get discouraged. You’ll feel things you never expected to feel.

One of the hardest lessons has nothing to do with money, paperwork, regulations, equipment, or the work itself. It is realizing that people you thought were your friends never really were.

You find out quickly who is and is not your friend, but only if you are willing to listen to your gut.

I’ve loved helping people for as long as I can remember. Unfortunately, that also means I have allowed people to take advantage of me for most of my life. Deep down, I usually knew what was happening. I felt it, thought about it, and saw the evidence, but I would talk myself out of believing it.

I didn’t want to admit that these “good friends” were mostly keeping me around because I was useful.

As long as I was solving a problem, operating a machine, fixing something, lending equipment, giving advice, or helping with a project, I was included. The second I was no longer useful, I wouldn’t hear from them again until they needed something else.

Even then, I kept believing they were my friends.

I would call to check on them and see how they were doing. They never called to check on me. I remembered what was happening in their lives, asked about their families, and made an effort to stay connected. They rarely showed the same interest in anything happening in mine.

The truth was slapping me directly in the face, and I still refused to accept it.

I kept thinking that maybe if I helped one more time, did one more favor, or showed them one more example of what a good friend looked like, they would eventually start treating me the same way.

It never happened.

Starting a business made all of this even more obvious.

I entered the highly regulated and complicated world of firearms manufacturing and built Nexus Defense & Machine Co. from scratch. I handled the licensing, registrations, paperwork, equipment, website, branding, content, services, and every other detail that comes with trying to turn an idea into a legitimate business.

It has been difficult, exhausting, and frustrating, but it is also something I am extremely proud of.

Naturally, I wanted to share that accomplishment with people I had considered friends for 20 or 30 years. I told them what I was working on and sent them links to the website I had built.

They would respond with something like, “Yeah, that’s cool. Looks good.”

The problem is that I built the website. I can see the traffic. I could see plainly that they never even clicked the link.

They couldn’t take two minutes to look at something that had taken me months to build, but they still wanted to give me the appearance that they cared.

That is not friendship.

Then there are the people who have directly asked me for help many times.

One particular friend has known me for close to ten years. During a construction project at his house, I spent around ten hours operating a machine for him getting a lot of work done that he couldn't do himself, I didn’t do it because I expected payment. I did it because I believed that was what friends did for each other.

Later, I needed help with some infrastructure in my shop to support the increased power demand of the new machines. He is an electrician. I was supplying everything we needed, and I would have been doing most of the physical work. I simply needed his knowledge and an extra set of hands. It was a two-man job that probably would have taken less than two hours.

He agreed. We picked a day and time.

He never showed.

A few days later, he apologized and said work had been busy. He suggested the following weekend. I said no problem.

That weekend came and went. He never showed again.

The cycle repeated several times. There was always another promise, another excuse, and another day that came and went. In the end, the help never came.

I gave ten hours when he needed me.

He couldn’t give me two.

That experience finally drove home a lesson I should have accepted years ago.

No one is coming to help you!

No one cares what you have done. No one cares what you are capable of. No one cares how many hours you spent learning, building, failing, fixing, and starting over.

In fact, your ambition can make some people uncomfortable.

Your drive threatens the false sense of worth they have built around themselves. Your progress challenges the story they tell themselves about why they never did more. Your willingness to work, sacrifice, learn, and keep moving exposes the excuses they have used to justify standing still.

Your success does not make them proud.

It reminds them of what they could have done.

Instead of admitting that, they try to pull you back toward their level.

They tell you that you work too much. They say you need to take some time off. They tell you to forget about the project for a night and come have a few drinks at the bar.

There is nothing wrong with taking a break or having a drink with friends. The problem is the mentality behind it when it comes from people who have made coasting through life their permanent plan.

They do not understand why you keep working because they do not want what you want.

They want to do just enough to get by. They want comfort, routine, and an excuse for why nothing ever changes. They want to complain about where they are without doing the work required to go somewhere else.

That is loser mentality.

That is not where I am in life.

I want more. I want to build something. I want to win. I want to find out what I am capable of, and I am willing to work when nobody is watching and keep going when nobody is encouraging me.

I do not need permission from people who abandoned their own ambitions.

I also do not need to drag them with me.

I finally realized that keeping people like that in your life does not make you loyal. It keeps you tied to an older version of yourself. They pull you back into the same conversations, the same memories, the same complaints, and the same “back in the day” bullshit because the past is the only place where they still feel important.

They are not interested in what you are building now because your future does not include the version of you they understood and could use.

Eventually, you have to stop waiting for them to become different people and because of that, I went through my social media accounts and phone contacts and removed many of these people from my life. I didn’t send angry messages. I didn’t announce my departure or demand explanations.

I simply deleted and blocked the people I had consistently been a friend to who had never truly been a friend to me.

I did it quietly because it wasn’t about punishing them.

It was about freeing myself.

The past is in the past, it's over. Hopefully, I have learned from it. I do not need to keep reliving it with people who have no interest in being part of my future.

The advice I would give any entrepreneur, or anyone trying to change their life, is simple.

Be generous, but pay attention.

Stop confusing history with loyalty. Stop judging friendships by what people say and start judging them by what they actually do. Pay particular attention to how they treat you when there is nothing they need from you.

Listen to your gut the first time.

Build your life and your business so they do not depend on unreliable people. Appreciate genuine help when it comes, but never surrender your progress while waiting for somebody else to show up.

No one is coming.

Keep going anyway.