Owning your own business requires that you be all in. You want to be successful? You have to commit. It’s not for the faint of heart. And early on you realize that it’s a whole family affair. From accommodating non-traditional work schedules to hosting clients for dinner, everyone is involved.
It’s things like running some forgotten papers to the office on the way to the kid’s science classes. Taking calls while we’re on a family outing. Planning vacation around work deadlines. And lots of late nights.
Since we love football, and football is on my mind, with the superbowl coming up – which btw, is a great time to have friends and business associates over – it’s easy for me to come up with a football illustration. The beginning of the football season I was listening to an interview on tv and the player had a quote that I wrote on my kid’s marker board. “The Success is in the Struggle”. It’s something I remind my kids of when they’re having a tough day in school. And it’s something I’ve had to apply to being an entrepreneur. When things get hard, I remind myself that we’re in this for the long haul, it’s not about everything being smooth, it’s about learning what can be learned from the struggles and coming out successful in the end.
Or like Thomas Edison said – he’s also on my mind because my 4th grader is studying him this week – “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10000 ways that won’t work”. It’s learning to look at “failures” not as failures but as something learned and an opportunity to use that experience and improve on it next try.
So, we do our best work and if it doesn’t work out, we learn from it and try again because truly success doesn’t happen when it’s easy, success comes from trying again when it’s hard.