Nike is Onto Something

Entrepreneurs. I looked at them like movie stars- living the dream and untouchable- especially if they were my age and had a success under their belt. I've always dreamed big and from the time I was a little girl, I cooked up some pretty concrete ideas of how I would earn my life in a beach house, as a world traveler, as a pony owner - depending on which stage of life I was in. These ideas all involved businesses that allowed me to work for myself. I'd dwell on the idea for a couple of weeks, get it all planned out and then come to the part where I had to do something about it. That's where I failed.

Let me take that back a bit. That's where I failed as an adult and until recently.  When I was a kid, my ideas didn't require much money to start up (except that one where I had a legion of 1,000 adoring employees who made me cotton candy and flew my friends and I to all the finest amusement parks.). I'd create something and then recruit salespeople or organization members and have at it. No, none of these businesses landed me multi-million dollar success (obviously) or even much cotton candy (still sad about that). But I did it. And it was fun.

Somewhere along the way, I lost the part where I "just did it". I started thinking there were rules to this kind of thing: you had to be somebody or know people or have this-much-more-money-than-I-have to start a business. I had lots of business ideas that I worked out to the finest details and then put away, frustrated. I glorified young business owners but believed that they had some secret formula and knowledge that I'd never have. I started thinking of working for the government.

Yeah, dream crushing, eh?

One day I got tired of it. I knew one thing I'd always been praised for and I just started telling people I'd do it for them. People accepted. They told others. Others accepted. Everyone rejoiced. No secret formula, no cash flow genie. 

One evening, at a party full of people I didn't know, I realized the roles had been reversed. The typical question was asked: What do you do for work? When I answered that I owned an organic bakery, the movie star stare came.  Others in the vicinity drew close. I found myself surrounded by a small band of starers praising my ability to start my own business and whispering to each other how they wished they could do something like that. Feeling uncomfortable by the attention and slightly creeped out by the care-bear stare, I told them simply, "Then just do it. That's what I did."

The fan club quietly dispersed, shaking their heads.  They didn't believe it was that simple.  They wanted a secret formula, just like I had.

The moral of this story can best be summed up by an excerpt from a book written by a couple of guys I had the opportunity to listen to at a summit a few weeks ago: 

Start the process of tinkering... start a new web site, a new marketing campaign, or a new Web community.  Why? The answer, you will quickly come to realize, is that, with everything you decide to do, "it's so crazy that it just might work." Understand that failure is an inevitable part of the game, but that the chance of success is much greater the more often you roll the dice.  You shouldn't fear it; you should embrace it.

 -Chris Brogan, Julien Smith in Trust Agents 

Throw away the notion of a secret formula. You just gotta do it.