There are times when I\’ve sat in a conference, looked around a room full of bright, hopeful entrepreneurs and wondered how many of them will become successful.
I don\’t mean how many of them will be successful this time next year or how many will be millionaires in five years\’ time.
I mean how many will be successful at all.
Sure, I\’m looking at a fairly self-selected group. If someone has made the effort to attend a marketing conference, that\’s a pretty good sign that they\’re serious about what they\’re doing. They\’re prepared to invest, to learn and to take the time to build their business.
Those are all important. But none of them mean anything without drive and confidence.
I really do believe that anyone can build a successful online Internet business. I don\’t think there\’s anything particularly special about me and none of the people I\’ve seen talking at conferences were superheroes either. We\’re all just regular people who built successful companies on the Web and want to see other people do the same thing.
But we all did one thing that helped push our businesses forward and take them to the next level.
We kept going.
We didn\’t expect to see giant results right away. We might have hoped that within a month of launching a new enterprise, we\’d be rolling in cash and lying on the beach but we didn\’t expect it. Instead, we assumed that we\’d move forward gradually, experimenting and learning as we went.
Most importantly, we expected that there would be times when growth would be flat and might even shrink. But instead of tossing in the towel and opening the vacancies page in the classifieds, we looked at what was going wrong, tried different approaches and kept going until things picked up.
We didn\’t think we\’d see success overnight but we were all absolutely certain that with hard work, dedication and a willingness to learn, we would achieve success one day.
That kind of drive and confidence isn\’t something you can see in an entrepreneur\’s face. But it is the difference between those who gave up halfway along the road and those who go all the way.