Maintain your momentum

“Momentum is really a leader’s best friend. Sometimes it’s the only difference between winning and losing… When you have no momentum, even the simplest tasks can seem to be insurmountable problems. But when you have momentum on your side, the future looks bright, obstacles appear small, and trouble seems temporary.”
John C. Maxwell: The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership

You often hear statistics to the effect that 8 of 10 new businesses fail in the first several years. Even if that were accurate, which it’s not, it’s not true. It’s not accurate because it includes too many people who are just sticking a toe in the water – setting up a website and then pulling the plug when it does not spontaneously go viral. More important, it’s not true, because businesses do not fail, owners quit. Let me repeat that: businesses do not fail, owners quit.

For every business that has “failed” there is another business in the same or worse straits in which the owner made one more phone call, went had-in-hand to one more bank, stayed up one more late night, made one more tweak to the website or the product, did whatever it took to keep the business going. From the outside, both businesses appear to be on the verge of failure. In one, the owner turned off the lights while in the other the owner burned the midnight oil because, in his or her mind, failure was not an option. When your world turns upside down, you will start over. The question is, are you sticking a toe in the water or do you have the “failure is not an option” determination that will assure you don’t quit?