One of the characteristics I believe is at the heart of my success and the success of most entrepreneurs, is an ability to keep working in the face of failure and an ability to force yourself to be productive when you don’t feel like it.
It’s very hard to be confident of success when you have yet to seriously experience it. In many ways, at this stage of your business career, faith and fake-it-till-you-make-it confidence in your idea has to carry you through the self doubt, the set-backs and the slow growth.
Nothing goes right all the time. Sometimes clients will ask for refunds, or they won’t be happy with what you provide or the universe creates a circumstance you had no way of predicting, which you just have to deal with.
For you beginners out there, one of the greatest challenges you face is your battle with self doubt. Others around you will scoff at your attempt to buck the trend to start a business, your own results will come slowly and for a long time you will have to work every day for little reward. Patience and willpower are necessary at this stage.
BetterEdit offered a great lesson for me. Placing posters on university campuses proved an effective marketing method, but the return on investment was delayed. I put up a poster and it would not elicit a response for months – sometimes even years – so my “pay off” for hard work was far in the future. This meant that I had to believe that clients would come if I just kept at it for long enough.
In hindsight faith in an outcome is easy because the experience is had, before this, you’re playing with chance and believing in the possibility of success without tasting it. If you don’t have tolerance for ambiguity, you better avoid the entrepreneur’s journey.
0 comments:
Post a Comment