The Successful Business Life, Part 1

July 6, 2007 |

The Successful Business Life

“To be in business is to be assaulted by relentless adversity and crisis; it comes with the territory.”

- Carter Henderson.

I’m very happy that I read this book fairly early in my entrepreneurial career, because this statement leaped out at me - everything else I’d read seemed dedicated to the premise that if you did things right, you could do business problem-free. This certainly was not my experience, and I was beginning to wonder if I was hopelessly screwed up when I first encountered this simple statement. With 25 years of entrepreneurial experience and 20/20 hindsight, I appreciate this profound statement even more. You see, it is my experience that even doing everything to the very best of your ability, and even trying to do everything with integrity, you will still deal with “adversity and crisis” constantly. When you are in an aggressive stage; growth, building, creating, then dealing with adversity, opposition, crisis, etc. is an unpreventable, unavoidable part of the game. The important thing to do about that is to make mental peace with it so that you do not overreact, or become so frustrated you can’t function or can’t enjoy what you’re doing, or conclude there’s something wrong with you, or worse, quit altogether. You’ll find throughout my writings about entrepreneurship a philosophical acceptance of the truth of the entrepreneurial experience as stated by Henderson.

How to build an exceptionally successful business life…….