Building a business is a fight. You have an idea, you go out there and everyone supports you with talk, but not the walk. The fight begins. At first, its deeply personal and very confusing. Because starting and building a business remains very personal, its very emotional and emotions always, if acted on, lose the fight. As you stay in the game, and that’s a fight you find more opponents. They are competitors and even customers. Once you have stayed and survived those battles, you hit the environment of business and our country. After that, it’s the rest of the world, often with curve balls like a global pandemic thrown in.
Business is built by your behavior. This is led by your attitude. The right attitude leads to the right behavior which builds the right business.
ATTITUDE IS WHAT BUILDS A BUSINESS
Fighting, embracing and agreeing to fight is the single biggest act of self-empowerment. An entrepreneur believes that they can create a better world. Optimist. Better because what’s out there is not good enough and can be done better. Already you can see, you are looking for a fight. Uber is a good example.
Professional fighters know that the act of fighting isn’t a raw spark of rage. To win, fighters have courage, strategy, tenacity and an insatiable will to succeed. Same-same for an entrepreneur.
Let’s explore a few of them…
Learn from being punched. Fear of failure, a certainty in every day actions, is a given. Embrace your fear and it goes. Fail fast, fail small, take small steps before big ones. A good fighter fights ahead of the present moment because success in building a business takes time. Getting wiped out in the first round doesn’t help. This also helps you become familiar with yourself; crucial to manage your ego. Vital to not take things personally. Central to your ability to reflect and learn.
Use your passion but have purpose. Asset of value.
Finishing a fight quickly with a single knockout blow is no different to wining a big deal once off. Its opportunistic. A business is built over time and endurance is vital. That means passion is vital. No passion means you are in the wrong game and space OR you have whittled it away because you only had passion.
Stick to your industry. Deepen your knowledge, contacts, understanding and mistakes. Make the mistakes in your industry to develop your experience. Relevant experience. That’s what experience is, a collection of mistakes. Eventually it becomes instinct/intuition. All that is comes from the mistakes that you made, that hurt, that you have consciously forgotten.
Avoid comfort, complacency. Be truthful to yourself. Whatever standard you are performing at, raise the bar for yourself and fight for a higher standard. Excellence should be a destination and striving for it a habit. Always stay hungry: perfect your craft, learn new skills and meet new people. If your organization is good, push it to be great. Never settle for the status quo.
Balance is an anomaly for the top fighters. Building a world class business means constant vigilance, attention and care. Its unrelenting. The better you do it, the more you’ll love it. The more you love it, the more it will grow you. You never hit plateaus in your spiritual and intellectual person.
You must obsess to stay ahead, to win and to be the best. Competition out there as well as inside of you as a fighter is relentless.
Set some goals. Get a plan in place to reach them. Set a big vision for the business because that’s where energy comes from. If you are fighting for tomorrow, you will be constantly investing in yourself and your business. If you are fighting for today, you will become an event. Wealth is cumulative. It takes time to build and it requires one brick placed on top of the next to create the home you envisage.
- Get a good team around you
Hire experts who understand all aspects of running a successful business, and listen to their advice. Create several goals that you hope to obtain in the coming years. You know you have created a good battle plan when others think you are crazy for trying to accomplish your goals.
