"If I had to select one quality, one personal characteristic that I regard as being most highly correlated with success, whatever the field, I would pick the trait of persistence. Determination. The will to endure to the end, to get knocked down seventy times and get up off the floor saying. "Here comes number seventy-one!" Richard M. Devos
I do not think it is a secret to any of my friends, family, readers, or even a select group of total strangers, that my life is absolutely normal chaos. Not to mention, it's the holidays. The holidays always bring their own fabulous group of challenges from finding the "perfect" gift, cooking, balancing a 3 month old and the rest of your family, to somehow finding a way to keep yourself cool, calm, and collected throughout the entire process. Well, last year I got pregnant over the holidays. Seemed all of the pressure of trying in the preceding months with no success fell to the wayside from the pressure of the holidays, and alas! Baby!
This year I'm hoping for another success at finally having the baby I've been dreaming of. No....I'm not talking about getting pregnant again just yet (after all Abby is only 3 months old), but rather the baby of the start-up business.
It seems that start-ups are never really out of their start-up phase until all of a sudden they are...kind of like infants to toddlers. Bam! How'd that happen?
Well right about now I feel like we're going through the terrible twos phase on our way to true bubbly enjoyable interactive toddler-hood. So my New Year's resolution is to persevere.
"If at first you don't succeed, you're running about average." M.H. Alderson
They say that 95% of new companies will fail in the first 5 years. WOW! With a "joyful" combination of things we have managed to stumble our way across the one year mark with a very bright future for Q1 of 2012. I guess that means that we're 20% of the way into making it out of the very dark tunnel that is on the path of every new company. To try and write everything I have learned during 2011 would take a book of its own, and probably a very nice bottle of wine (after all I'd need one to bring up all of the memories and not suppress some). But just like raising children, you don't start a company because it's a "cute idea", you do it out of a complete level of selfless love.
However it is not enough to just keep trudging on. It is not enough to keep TRYING to raise your children right, you have to find a talent for it.
"Perseverance is the most overrated of traits, if it is unaccompanied by talent; beating your head against a wall is more likely to produce a concussion in the head than a hole in the wall."
If you keep banging your head, you might not get the desired result. Sometimes I feel like I am doing the above, working more towards a concussion than a hole in the wall. Maybe I need to take a step back and grab the sledge hammer, accept assistance, and approach the wall again with the same amount of drive I had when I was beating my head against it. If there is one thing I have learned since becoming a mother that speaks to running a start-up company it is this:
Just because something works today, don't expect it to tomorrow. Yesterday's solution has a variable that today's problem does not...it was yesterday. If you feel like you have run out of options take a look at your child; they will show you the way to a new set. You have to be open to the possibility that your surroundings know more than you do.
Until next time....
Dabble
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