Silence.

When you run your own business, even if you're located near a road crew with jackhammers next to a maga rally next to an edm concert, the loudest noise you'll ever hear is the sound
of your phone not ringing.

Likewise, when I played ball and things weren't going well, the loudest sound you were likely to hear was your bat not hitting the horsehide or the whisper of your manager beckoning you into his small office with the words, "can I see you for a minute?"

In so many walks of life the loudest sound you can hear is the sound of what you want to hear not happening.

There's only one way to deal with this universal malady.

That is, to keep showing up.

This year, my sixth running GeorgeCo., LLC, a Delaware Company, has had more extended periods of slow than any of my other years. Those slows were made worse because I lost a retainer client who paid me $9,000/month since I opened my doors. That fee was security. I was earning something, even when I wasn't earning anything.

When you get old and things start slowing down, I suppose you feel like a 33-year-old gorilla in an enclosure in a municipal zoo. 

You say to yourself, "maybe I've played out the string. Maybe my best bananas are behind me. Maybe my own personal simian symphony has reached its last page and I'm coming to the end of my score."

You start to ask yourself if your act has gotten old. If you're like a mediocre TV show in the last year of its run. If you've gotten broad, desperate and no-longer funny.

You can, if you know how to tap-dance, also blame external events. You can say to friends who ask, "I think the tump economy is biting me in the ass. No one wants to spend money." Or "everyone is so cheap now-a-days, no one wants to pay me when they can get AI to do it."

It's not hard to find excuses if you know where to look and everyone knows where to look. Just read a soon-to-be-defunct-holding-company press release. You'll find enough excuses in the first paragraph to sink a battleship.

There is a way to silence the cacophony of silence. 

Whether you're running your own tin-pot agency, trying to play one more season, writing a sitcom or in a zoological park, as most of us are.

It's showing up every day. 

It's re-doubling your efforts, not halving them.

It's rooting around in the dirt and the brambles and your forty years of sweat and sinew and finding faith.

Faith that blood, sweat, toil and tears can conquer, or at least subdue, most things. It's not searching high and low for a temporary painkiller, panacea or magic bullet. It's dancing with the partner you brought to the sock-hop.

Everyone, now and again, starts doing high-dives into the end of the pool that's shallowest.

Take the hit.

Shake off the shake.

Climb up again.

Do the things you've always done that have always paid dividends. Work. Hunt. Think. Try things. Work some more.
Hunt some more. Blather, rinse, repeat.

Listen.

Eventually you'll hear it.

The blaring lack of silence returns.