We all start out as children and we are artists and we are singers of songs. We dream because no one has told us no. We don’t think much about financial reward rather about what it is what we would like to be when we grow up. Then suddenly one day we go to school and another child tells us that our pictures are no good. So we stop drawing and we stop being artists because one person who knows nothing about art tells us our pictures stink. Another child tells us that are singing isn’t good, in fact they might tell us its horrible, and we believe them. Our dreams are made fun of and dismissed.
John Ferriter, a legendary Hollywood agent, who discovered Ryan Seacrest, Jimmy Kimmel and host of other celebrities over the years, said life is full of temporary people who make permanent decisions, and that you need to do everything possible to get around them.
I’ve always believed that everything in life is a type of sale. Not financial transaction, but being convinced that we are either good enough or not good enough by others and sometimes ourselves. We can be very persuading. We make a decision based on all of these temporary people telling us what they think. We let them sell us the idea that we can’t. Some of these people are very experienced and others know very little, but we find them all persuasive. Possibly because it’s easier to believe negative things about ourselves than it is the positive. We have been conditioned to accept that we are not good enough.
My nephew Riley was out on a walk with his brother and his father this past week, he is only four years old, when he saw a fish in the river next to the path he told his father that he was going to catch it. My brother-in-law deserves credit here because rather than tell his son that he lacked the tools and experience in order to catch the fish, he told him to go for it. As adults it’s very easy to find ourselves telling small children what they can and cannot do. Most of this is under the guise of protecting them but ultimately it’s a reflection of our own personal failures and our inability to achieve what we want easily.
The small four-year-old boy walked into the river put his hands in the water and pulled out the fish much to everyone’s surprise including his father.
No one has told him that he can’t catch a fish that way. It would’ve been easy to tell him that he didn’t have the right shoes or that he didn’t have a pole or that he lack the necessary experience or even the bait to catch a fish.
As entrepreneurs you have a duty to yourself and to the people that would have your products and services in their lives. Do not be sold by people who lack sufficient success in their lives to guide you. Instead remember the small boy who caught a fish with his bare hands simply because he believed he could.
