The

Entrepreneurial

Code

Lessons from an

Ivy League Entrepreneur

Chapter Twenty-Eight

At times, Johnny began to worry they were risking too much. The mounting liabilities needed to be paid somehow. There were times when he became concerned, despite his initial cavalier attitude.  He considered slowing things down or even taking an alternative approach. It’s difficult to think clearly sometimes when you have already invested so much time and emotion, and when you expect that second-guessing yourself is natural. That’s when Johnny, Maverock, and Abe looked to each other for confirmation.

Johnny and Abe were more conservative by experience. Their parents worked for big companies and never owned their own businesses. Maverock, on the other hand, had a different perspective. Perhaps it was because his family was so entrepreneurial, and he had experienced their ups and downs. When it came to second-guessing yourself, working with Maverock was like having a motivational speaker as part of the company. He had Johnny reading Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World.  Maverock practically had everyone running around the office shouting, “I refuse to be a failure! I refuse to be a failure! I refuse to be a failure!”

There was a paragraph from The Greatest Salesman in the World that basically said experience is “wasted on dead men.” It compared experience to fashion in that “an action that proved successful today will be unworkable and impractical tomorrow.”

That way of thinking made Johnny feel a lot better. With that rationale, it didn’t matter if they each didn’t have 10 years of marketing experience. Johnny highlighted a few other paragraphs in the same chapter:

“I will never consider defeat and I will remove… such words and phrases as quit, cannot, unable, impossible, out of the question, improbable, failure, unworkable, hopeless, and retreat; for they are the words of fools… I will toil and I will endure.  I will ignore the obstacles… and keep mine eyes on the goals above my head…”

They were powerful words, and even though Johnny might have dismissed them as being a bit hokey, Maverock took them pretty seriously. The two of them actually sat down and talked about how important it was to believe in yourself, and how to prevent the “fear of failure” from keeping you from doing the right things. There was another paragraph Johnny highlighted that read:

“I will persist until I succeed… I am not a sheep waiting to be prodded by my shepherd. I am a lion and I refuse to talk, to walk, to sleep with the sheep. I will hear not those who weep and complain, for their disease is contagious.  Let them join the sheep. The slaughterhouse of failure is not my destiny.”

That way of thinking, of turning your brain off to doubts and charging ahead was contagious. Maverock was running around the office reminding everyone they weren’t “sheep,” they were “lions.” All of those people who were too scared to start their own companies and were working for investment banks and consulting firms, they were sheep. They were going to get slaughtered. The partners were going to succeed.

Unfortunately, those books were written for people that didn’t have the self-confidence to take action. That was clearly not Johnny and his partner’s weakness.  They didn’t realize it, but they weren’t doing battle with self-doubt because they lacked self-confidence.  It was because they had legitimate concerns about their strategy. All the self-affirmations in the world shouldn’t have overcome their willingness to reassess.

The right answer might have been to test their new strategy on a smaller scale.  Perhaps they needed to focus on 4 schools, not 4,000.   If it didn’t work, they could have minimized their losses.  If it worked, they would have been in a better position to move forward the next year. Unfortunately, Johnny and his partners had pressured themselves to hurry things along.  They took comfort in the stories they knew of successful entrepreneurs that bet the farm and succeeded.  If Johnny and his partners were going to do this, they decided to wipe away any self-doubt.  They refused to fail.  They wouldn’t stop until they succeeded.  They weren’t “sheep” they told themselves. They were “lions.”

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
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