Inspiration Notes: Success
"Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm." - Winston Churchill
Inspiration Notes: These are 6 x 4 inch entrepreneur quotes that can be printed on Notecards. I like to keep these handy on the days that I am not feeling quite so confident. It keeps me inspired and allows me to tinker with my design passion.
I love to read about entrepreneur heroes for many reasons. Hearing about how they became successful is fascinating, but have found out that I have always learned more from how they handled defeat, failure and setbacks. And there seem to always be setbacks. I have gleaned that the path of success is not always a smooth one. For some reason this is very comforting to me. When I have a setback, the first thing that enters my head is the tiny voice that says "give up".
But, then I begin to think about the setbacks of some of the biggest entrepreneurial names. I truly try to imagine myself in their place. What if I was living in a friends basement after a failed business or filed for bankruptcy? Or kicked out of my own company like Steve Jobs? Or have something fail on a global, million dollar scale? Would I have the will to keep going and building businesses? Yup. This is a choice, everyday. I choose not to work in an office, live in the rat race and commute. I choose independence and wealth making. I am a machine and nothing is going to stop me. As crazy as running my own business makes me, there is nothing else that I would rather do.
Here are some examples that serve as a mantra for me:
The Beatles were turned down by every major label, and some even twice.
Richard Branson was dyslexic in school and struggled with grades.
Robert Kiyosaki lived in a friends basement when his first business collapsed.
Frederick W. Smith (FedEx) created Zapmail as competition to fax machines and lost his company $350 million.
Steve Jobs was forced to resign from Apple in 1985. They later asked him back.
And some days I want to pack it in because I lost a word document, or Amazon sales tax confusion. Ha! People have always done far more with far less.
For the successful ones, the voice in their head saying "keep going" was always louder than the negative one. Oftentimes the obstacles they were facing before they succeeded are larger than anything I am going through. But we are not alone in feeling defeated.
For some insght on dealing with setbacks read this interview with Richard Branson at Entrepreneur.com.
Keep calm and happy succeeding,
Susan