By N D Brown
I just saw the movie GRAVITY.
(I suggest the 3D version. It is the first 3D film I have seen that was worth the extra bucks.)
It is about overcoming gut-wrenching fear and a purity of loneliness that freezes the brain, pushing it to delusional thoughts.
As a new business owner you have lived or are living through both.
You have felt that coppery taste of fear that floods your mouth as you wonder if you will ever make another sale, or if you can make the next rent payment, or make the next payroll, or make any of the other myriad commitments you made when you got started.
We have all lived through it.
When you started, you knew your idea was better. The product you had developed was better than any of the others. The service you were offering beat the competition hands down.
Still there was no way to keep the doubts from creeping in.
The movie GRAVITY doesn’t offer any lessons, moral or otherwise. It will just remind you that your success is up to you. It might help you swallow that taste of fear and get a grip on the power of you.
After I had bitten the bullet and left corporate America and opened my small business, I was walking through the office, last one to leave, and I realized what I had done. From a challenge to be just that much better than other advertising agencies, a tiny group of three had grown to more than sixty!
We had taken an idea and grew it to make work for sixty people. There was a host of ancillary businesses that depended on us to make business for them. We were setting new standards and teaching new methods. We gave people a place to come each day to learn and grow and get pride from their efforts.
From the moment of the idea to start a new company, we had never thought of failure. For us, the future was filled with brightness. The opportunities were endless and we were the best.
Yet it was always there; lurking. Every day we worked through the fear and the loneliness of being on the edge. We could measure our success with a balance sheet but we preferred to measure it in the smiles on the people who worked with us.
But the destroyers of success in a small business were still there – Fear. – Loneliness.
If you see GRAVITY, you will hear the NASA command center anonymous voice. The irony is that it is the voice of actor Ed Harris who played the role of Gene Kranz in APOLLO 13. Kranz replaced legendary Chris Kraft as NASA flight commander who had become the voice of space exploration. You should remember Kranz’s famous line, “Failure is not an option”. It should be a signatory line in your small business.
Failure was not an option in APOLLO 13 and it is not in GRAVITY; and as I left the theater reflecting on that lonely walk down darkened hallways, I realized none of us ever thought about failure. We knew we would be a success.
I am willing to bet the thought of failing never crossed your mind either.
There are tons of books and pithy sayings about how failure is the best way to success.
Learning to fail is big part of high priced management lessons but what they are talking about is failure after the business started. They teach you that you should always get up and start over. Lesson learned. History teaches etc.
Today, I am talking about living with the knowledge that failure is not an option. Too often, without realizing it, we succumb to the fear and the loneliness that breeds fear.
To me there are two key words to success:
Courage – Confidence
You must have both in equal measures.
That really is not a ‘duh’.
You have already proven that you started with both key attributes. If you were like me, in those early days, you probably never thought about either of them. You just did what had to be done. That was then and this is now. To stay successful, you have to keep renewing them.
There is another word I think key to staying successful and that is ‘Why’.
It takes courage and confidence to ask that question repeatedly.
A two year old has no idea about what courage and confidence are but a child at that age wants to know – Everything. And so should you!
Big success – Why?
Customer rejects an idea with a great price – Why?
Customer applauds your effort to please – Why?
Are you really ready to hear the bad stuff and to dig under the good stuff to find if there are cracks?
The only way to know is to ask why; over and over. The two year old is learning and so are you.
As a small business, you are probably limited in your resources. Your bigger competitors can probably out-research you but you are lucky because they rarely ask why. I know because when I was in that environment, my whys were answered with looks of derision.
The big guys often walk away from failures and even more rarely investigate the whys of success.
As a small business, you should be quicker to react and more dedicated to knowing. So probing with why should be a mantra.
Overcome the loneliness with knowledge. Subdue the fear with your already proven courage. Use your confidence to assure yourself that you will find the right answer because failure is not an option.
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N D Brown is a Principal of brownchild ltd inc, 3754 Sunset Blvd., Houston TX 77005. You can reach him at 713-807-9000 or cell at 713-822-8370. Contact him by email at don.brown@brownchild.com or visit him on the web at www.brownchild.com.
