Are You Courageous Enough to Fail?
Few accept to walk the tight rope over an unknown and scary zone to get to success waiting on the other side
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Have you ever heard of Philippe Petit? In 1974, he performed the illegal act of walking on a tight rope between the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in New York City. His stunt received international coverage and was even made into a book, The Walk, and later a movie, Man on a Rope.
Philippe’s chances of failure were very high. In fact, he risked the ultimate thing one can: his own life. This was definitely an extreme example, but I wanted to illustrate the parallels that success often feels like walking on a tight rope.
Success is never quick nor easy. One must work hard for it. Yet some people are making massive mistakes in how they go about achieving success.
As a business coach, I regularly see a couple of worrisome behaviors that hold entrepreneurs back from success:
The Tsunami Fail
Kent has been a business owner for several years. He struggles, so he has a day job employed for someone. But his dream is to quit and succeed in his business.
Kent has a good dream, but his stubbornness is a problem. Kent is in denial. Kent believes he is right….about almost everything. He struggles and struggles yet he doesn’t often implement good advice. Anything that pushes him into new territory scares him, so he retreats to old tactics that don’t bring him new clients. So he does nothing.
“I’m just gonna stand there and watch you burn…” sang Rihanna in an Eminem song.
What would you do if your house were on fire? Or you are about to lose everything?
Would you continue watching your tv show or drinking your tea?
Unless you are nuts, no, you’d get the heck out of there, call for help, and get the fire hose to put out the fire, right??
Yet many entrepreneurs are like Kent. They watch passively as figuratively their businesses fail. Often…
