I respect experts and I love conducting thorough research just so I can feel that much more confident about what I “know.” Sometimes after a while, your own birth-given intelligence kicks in and you wonder, “Wait a minute…” Not everything is meant to be questioned, but below are some well-known facts, where, at second glance, are not all that factual.
1. “If you keep doing what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.”
Nothing has ever been further from the truth. Think back to RIM’s BlackBerry: they came out as one of the most powerful companies and they did what they did and got 55.3% smart phone market share, they kept doing what they did and that number dropped significantly to about 0.6%. Kodak kept doing what they were doing and filed for bankruptcy. Dinosaurs kept on keeping on and became extinct. You get the picture.
2. “You have as many hours as [insert name of very successful and powerful business man].”
Actually you don’t. Maybe when they were plain and ordinary like you, but think of Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft: he has over 90,000 employees. Multiply that by, let’s say they work a normal 9–5 job, so that’s roughly 8 hours (lets exclude workaholics who work weekends and fortune 500 executives who are known for working 80+ hours weekly). When that math adds up, Bill Gates has approximately 720,000 extra hours a day. So the saying here should be, “you have as many hours as the people who are just like you; to get as many hours as Bill Gates, start employing people and buying their time.”
3. “Entrepreneurship means being your own boss.”
It’s a statement that should be taken with lots of salt if your main reason for going the entrepreneur route is to become your own boss. Maybe you won’t have someone micro managing you or someone to report to when you clock in and before clocking out, but try having your customer as a direct boss. You set up your calendar according to their schedule, and you want to make sure they’re happy. Even when you were holding down a job, the customer was number one priority but an unhappy customer didn’t threaten your job as much as it would if it were your company.
4. “Good things come to those who wait.”
“Yeah Molly, so I was just like sitting and waiting and it all just happened. Hey, everything I’ve ever wanted, like, it just like, fell on my lap.” Patience is good; it is a great virtue, but good things come to those who go out there, take action and make things happen and have never waited for anyone to give them the go ahead on their dreams and goals.
5. “Fail your way to success.”
*Disclaimer: failure is sometimes the best thing that can happen to someone. I must admit that this was a tough one to put in. It holds a lot of weight, and it’s true to an extent. I do not believe failure is a rite of passage to becoming successful. Yes, it’s important when it happens, and you MUST make certain you learn everything that lesson has to teach. It can also become an excuse for people to not plan, and then execute poorly. The Internet is packed with information on just about anything, so failure can be mitigated and more manageable. There’s nothing new under the sun, so if you follow and take guidance from people who’ve walked that road, your chances for success should outweigh the possibilities of failure. Featured photo credit: Jan Erik via unsplash.imgix.net
