Sometimes in life, you get knocked down by something you do not expect, despite all your advance planning and hard work.
It can be heartbreaking.
At an IAAF World Championships in London, a virus knocked several athletes out of their events. Some had trained for years and even decades for that big day, then didn’t even get a chance to compete and lose… they had to watch from the sidelines, even worse!
A few athletes came back to win glorious Gold Medals after years of injuries. Others were expected to get the Gold in historic races but didn’t, maybe getting “only” a Silver or Bronze… And then there’s what happened in the last race of the great running legend Usain Bolt… who just literally got knocked to the ground by a hamstring cramp as I was starting to think about this next post.
Life, when things like this happen can be heart-wrenching.
The choice of what you do next is what ultimately determines your destiny — whether in business, in sport, or wherever you are or do in life.
Sometimes it’s entirely out of your control, like an illness or injury, drought or earthquake, or even a war. An instance, is where we find ourselves now, in the midst of a global pandemic, which has brought some large corporations down on their knees. Other times, it’s you and you alone who made a wrong judgment call.
The late writer Maya Angelou once said something like this: “You will face many defeats in your life, but never let yourself be defeated.”
# Never let yourself be defeated
If you want the “thrill of victory” as the old saying goes from the Wide World of Sports, you have to be prepared to bounce back from the agony of defeat, time and again.
If you choose to turn your small business into a big business, one thing I can guarantee is that things will not always turn out like you planned, and things will definitely go wrong from time to time. You may lose for a short while or even for a long while, but…
# Never let yourself be defeated
The main difference between most of the greatest characters in history and everyone else? The choices they made after they got knocked down.
Notice I keep saying the word “choose.” Getting back up is a choice. “Course correcting” when you need to, is a choice. Giving up is a choice. Innovating is a choice. Remembering that your business must have a life separate from you, like we talked about a few weeks ago, that is a choice, too…
What do YOU think are main differences between a business destined to stay small and one that eventually grows huge? I can tell you one: Mindset.
__If you get knocked down, you must choose to get back up:
# Re-do your homework.
# Seek advice from credible and trusted people, and don’t just listen to what you want to hear.
# Reflect and re-analyze.
# Extract the valuable lessons learned.
# Dust yourself off, if you haven’t already!
# Then move forward, onward and upward, this time with more wisdom and experience.
This is how you will transform your small business into an institution.
Author: Strive Masiyiwa
