Feb 22 2009
What does it take to build a successful long term enterprise? I’m not a businessman (I’m a business….man), but I can speculate based on what I’ve seen work and not work.
Time, energy, patience, dedication and a positive outlook seem to really be all that it takes. I know that these are all really generic term, but the more and more I study on people I admire, these seem to be the qualities they all seem to possess. Time and patience being the most difficult to come by I think. In my lifetime, I’ve watched several types of ventures taken by several different types of people, and the most likely to fail in my book…the hustler.
You know the hustler. They’re the ones that work really hard, go aggressively after what they want, but realize their enterprise fails after a little bit. Why? My guess is patience. I don’t know many good hustlers that can exercise patience. Hustlers generally want immediate results and push to get what they want as quickly as possible. It’s like McDonald’s food…it’s fast, but not necessarily good for building a healthy body over time.
Now, I think this is a good thing in some cases. My natural Capricorn tendency is to take the slow and steady road. Study up on what you need to do, and do it in phases. Grow from the bottom up, learning every nook and cranny of your enterprise, and minimizing bumps and bruises along the way. While, this is a good method in my opinion, you need to balance it out with some sort of nervous anxiety that pushes you to be better faster; which can only lead to you being more efficient as time moves on.
You know, the more I think about it, it isn’t balancing two extremes, but finding a new medium somewhere. Being able to find the actual time and most effective course of action that something takes is tough. I guess thats the balance that I’m personally trying to find, instead of being crazy and imbalanced like I already am. I have the tendency to be patient and orchestrate what I want to happen, but the anxiety that comes along with many people in our generation to aim for the stars and throw without doing the proper calculations. This is cool to do in some cases, but not in business.
What I’ve noticed about some really successful business people is the anxiety to push forward and push everything to its limits, but the capacity to understand the depth of what they need to get done. My question is…why the rush? I understand that business is often a competition for resources, time, money, etc, but its like running a race. I would think you would only want to compete with the best runners, or at the very least you don’t want to race against the kids from the fat camp…the reward isn’t as satisfying. So, if you’re going to run in a race thats worth the reward of winning, then you would want to be in shape when you run. You’ll never be in perfect shape, but you would want to compete in decent enough shape, right? You wouldn’t want to have a gut, still be recovering from a sprained ankle, and just plain outta shape, right?
No! You wouldn’t, so why would you essentially take the same ideology into creating a long term self-sustaining enterprise? Why wouldn’t you know about marketing? Why wouldn’t you write a business plan? Why wouldn’t you want to do what you’re supposed to do to ensure your success. There is a formula, but you have to study, and create your own.