In your entrepreneur journey have you ever faced a problem that makes you really sad and hopeless? Our chest feels burned and our steps feel wobbled. We experienced many sleepless nights wondering countless problems in our business. We are afraid to get out of our bed and to walk into the office to meet our team.
Starting a new business is a stressful job that can create emotional turbulence. According to the Gallup Wellbeing Index, 45% of entrepreneurs report being stressed compared to 42% of “other workers.” Entrepreneurs also report being more likely to have nervous wrecks than most people.
In my 10 years experienced running businesses and interacting with many start-up founders, I can assure that every start-up will usually face their own challenge. Developing a new product or service requires a lot of validations and experiments. Yet, every experiment has probability to success or to failure. During our journey to validate our business model, the pressure on our shoulders is inevitable.
Moreover, the ability to face every challenge on the way of developing a business could represent our persistence in achieving our dreams. There are a lot of successful inventors who have to experience many failed experiments. Thomas Alfa Edison has 1093 patents in many fields. Yet, only a few of his parents became successful inventions. The more persistence we have, the larger possibility to find the working experiments.
Sometimes the challenge can be rather difficult for us to handle. Some people have to swallow the bitter fact that they failed (again) this time. Hence, history told us that big failures can give birth to tough business person that will succeed in the future. Steve Jobs had to be fired from his own company until he came back to Apple 11 years later and transformed Apple to be the biggest company in the world.
Big challenge can also force us to be a better person. There was a big disaster happening to NASA in the Apollo 1 project that became a lesson for them to have a better system. In 1967 three astronauts were killed when a fire swept through the command module during the first Apollo 1 flight. Astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee were all killed. They were the first American astronauts to die in spacecraft. After that tragedy, NASA completely created a much safer system. Finally, in 1969 they successfully landed an aircraft on the moon.
If we are during facing a challenge, look at it as an exam to level up our personal performance. By the time we can exceed the exam, we transform into a better person with a higher quality. After passing an exam, then we have to prepare ourselves to face other bigger exams through the journey. Brace ourselves that there will be many challenges ahead during our journey in developing our business.