Lessons Learned From a Failed Ivy League Entrepreneur

A "Case Story" By Chris Cononico
 

Chapter Thirty-One

I began to worry that we were risking too much. After all, we had mounting piles of obligations, and tthese liabilities needed to be paid somehow. There was many a time when I became concerned, despite my initial cavalier attitude, and I wanted to slow things down or even consider an alternative approach. It’s difficult when you have already invested so much time and emotion, and when you expect that second-guessing yourself is natural. That’s when George, Mark, and I looked to each other for confirmation. Should we be taking this path?

I think Mark and I were more conservative by experience. Our parents worked for big companies and never owned their own businesses. George, 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 first hand. When it came to questioning our motivations or second-guessing ourselves, working with George was like having our own motivational speaker as part of the company. He had me reading Og Mandino’s The Greatest Salesman in the World. George practically had us 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 me feel a lot better. With that rationale, it didn’t matter if we didn’t each have 10 years of market experience. When I flipped through my copy of the book years later, I noticed I had a few other paragraphs highlighted 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 I might have dismissed them as being a bit hokey, George took them pretty seriously. We 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 I 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. George was running around the office reminding everyone we weren’t “sheep,” we 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. We were going to succeed.

It’s a very difficult situation because we had a lot of doubts about what we were doing, and how viable our strategy to dominate the industry was going to be. In retrospect, I believe in the face of such uncertainty, the answer is not to charge ahead. Those books were written for people that didn’t have the self-confidence to take action. That was clearly not our weakness. We didn’t realize it, but we weren’t doing battle with self-doubt because we lacked self-confidence. It was because we had serious questions about our strategy. All the self-affirmations in the world shouldn’t have overcome our legitimate concerns.

The right answer would have been to take an “options” approach, and test our new strategy on a smaller scale. We needed to focus on 4 schools, no 4,000. If it didn’t work, we could have minimized our losses. If it worked, we would have been in a better position to move forward the next year. However, that time frame was unacceptable to me, as I have already explained. I was pressuring myself to hurry things along.

I still reasoned that 22 years old was the best time in my life to be taking so much risk. I took comfort in the stories I heard about successful entrepreneurs being in similar situations, where they bet the farm and rolled 7’s. If I was going to do this, I decided to wipe away my self-doubt. I needed to refuse to fail. I wouldn’t stop until I succeeded. I wasn’t a “sheep,” I told myself; I was a “lion.”

 

Copyright  2005 by Chris Cononico
All rights reserved. No part of this manuscript may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.