It’s only natural that when you start a business, you’re doing something different than most people. Not only will you be stared at because you stick out like a sore thumb, but human nature will naturally cause people to ridicule what you’re doing. They’ll tell you all sorts of things like, “You’re not business material.” “You can’t make a living working for yourself.” “You will fail because no one can make money that way.”
Entrepreneurship is not just about having lots of ideas or business sense. It’s also about having a lot of guts. You have to build confidence in yourself. You only have to worry about pleasing yourself and your Creator (God), not humanity. So when (and if) you fail with this particular venture, you’ll just dust yourself off and start over. It doesn’t matter if people “think” you’re crazy! They are not paying their rent and running their lives. Don’t worry about what people “think” you should be. Just please yourself and do what you feel is right. People are too busy competing with society and “keeping up with the Joneses” that they do things they are uncomfortable with just to appease them and appear “normal” (whatever that is).
And if you have to start small in building your self-confidence. He used to be so shy that he would never eat alone in a restaurant because he thought that people would believe that he was alone and that he had no friends. Incredible but true. But every day he worked to go into a restaurant, pick up a magazine to read, and eat alone. He looked around me and, to my amazement, no one ever looked at me. No one cared that he was eating alone. So then I fallen in reason; “Who cares what these people think? I’ll never see them again.” In addition, there were many other people eating alone as well and I was able to absorb myself in the magazine that I had taken to read. Now, I can eat in restaurants and not think about the people around me.
But back to business: when most people fail in business, they try to “save face” by telling everyone that they are “just in a slump” and everything will be back to normal soon. Also, they don’t want people to say, “I told you so” and destroy whatever pride they still hold on to. Unfortunately, this only delays the problem and creates even more false hope for the people in your life and for yourself.
The best thing anyone can do in this catastrophe is swallow their pride and admit they screwed up. Just face it head on! Admit that you were so proud of your accomplishments that your mind was filled with “visions of sweet plums and fantasy land.”
If your small business is beyond repair, go out and find a job and start working on your next small business in the near future. Keep your family fed and meet your financial obligations, but look forward to the day when you will succeed with your new business venture.
And why should I try again? Simply because you won’t make the same mistakes you did this time. If you built something successful before (but failed), you will surely build the next stronger and wiser business. Even if you fail the second time, it won’t be because of the mistakes you made the first time. You will learn more and more and eventually you will succeed. It is unavoidable!
With the help of the internet, you can get a lot of ideas by searching on google.com and overture.com, yahoo.com. In today’s world of information, you are in a much better position to succeed if you really want to succeed.
