Friday’s Promise: Resilience

“We only need to be strong enough to stand. Whether we stand shaking in fear or shaking our fist, as long as we stand, we are strong enough.”
Joseph M. Marshall, III: Keep Going: The Art of Perseverance

You often hear figures quoted about business failure – i.e. eight of every ten new businesses fail within the first five years or something like that. Not only is that inaccurate (excluding people who are just sticking a toe in the water the five-year survival rate for new businesses is much greater than that), it is also just not true. Businesses do not fail – owners quit. For every business that has “failed” there is another where, in the very same dire straits, the owner(s) put in one more late night, made one more sales call, did whatever it took to survive that dark night of the business soul and went on to build a very successful enterprise.

In his book The Last Lecture (with Jeffrey Zaslow), Randy Pausch said that brick walls are not there to stop you, they are there to make you prove how much you want something. Internalizing Friday’s Promise will help you bounce back every time you fall and blast your way through every brick wall.