“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” - Babe Ruth
Hi friend, welcome back. So my name is Rebecca for those who are new here and today we’re focusing on small business motivation.
In just a minute, I’m going to be telling the story of my biggest failure in business, and how I overcame it.
But first, let’s go ahead and dive a little deeper into that opening quote.
Let’s read it one more time.
“It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.” - Babe Ruth
So today I want to talk about perseverance.
The definition of perseverance according to Google is “persistence in doing something despite difficulty or delay in achieving success.” (Thanks to Google dictionary for that!)
I like to think of it as getting back up over and over and over again, as many times as we fall down, or as many times as we fail.
So you may be wondering, ‘ok how does all of this relate to small business?’
But I think it is very relevant, because most, if not all, of us in small business, we learn a lot by trial and error. Or in other words, failure.
We’re simply NOT the CFOs of Fortune 500 empires. We must embrace our small beginnings and try our best to grow over time.
But actually, my belief is that for all business owners, no matter how big or how small the company, business requires some trial and error from all of us.
And you know what that means? Failure.
So in the end, it seems like we have to get used to facing failure, and learning to persevere.
Facing failure over and over again is challenging and disheartening to say the least, and if you’re not ready for it, it will be very easy to give up.
When we face failure over and over and over again, we can start feeling like we don’t know enough, we’re not educated enough or good enough experts in our own field.
Failure has the tendency to discourage us and to try to tell us we should not keep trying. Like we should just give up when we keep facing failure time and time again.
But I am learning to see failure in a different way. I’m learning that we should look at failure as our friend, and not our foe.
So in addition to facing failure, we need to actually start embracing failure.
Failing can make us feel like we ourselves are failures. Which sort of makes sense right?
And it can also make us feel like imposters. Like we aren’t good enough and don’t belong.
I mean, successful people never fail, right? Or rarely at least? Or only in the past but once they become successful they don’t fail anymore?
Actually, that is false. The truth is that:
I think the important thing to learn is that everyone fails, but successful people are the ones who learn to be friends with failure, and to use it to their own advantage.
We can be tempted to look at successful people and think that they don’t make mistakes or that they never fail.
But the truth is that they fail just as much as you or I, or even more, because they’re willing to take more risks. But the difference is that they use their failures instead of being set back by them.
I once heard Dave Ramsey talk about this and it really stuck with me, because I used to get way more discouraged by setbacks, and get tempted to quit. But what he said changed my perspective.
If you don’t know much about Dave Ramsey, the only important thing you need to know right now is that he is a very, very successful business man who has self-made a net worth in 100’s of millions of dollars. Starting from literally nothing.
And what he said that really stuck with me is that people always tend to look at him and other successful people and think that they have climbed up to where they are by standing on a huge pile of successes, but that’s not actually the case.
He said, in reality, successful people have climbed to where they are not on a huge pile of successes, but on a huge pile of failures, or garbage.
When I heard that, it really encouraged me.
Failure hurts when it happens to us. It can really hurt when we believe the lies it tells us, that we are failures or imposters who don’t deserve to be doing whatever we’re doing.
But like we talked about in a previous motivation episode, we have to punch imposter syndrome in the nose.
We can’t be afraid of failure, we just have to keep moving forward. And we can’t be discouraged by failure either.
Instead, we need to allow it to put another layer of thickness onto our skin and another layer of knowledge into our mind.
Ok, so you’re wanting me to tell you about my biggest failure in business now, right? Alright, here we go.
My biggest failure or setback in business was when I got banned from Etsy. Yes, I did.
And my entire business that I had built up on Etsy was all gone in an instant.
At the time, I was leaning very heavily on Etsy for my business. So I felt like my entire business was wiped out in the blink of an eye.
And worse than that, I blamed myself for making the mistakes that caused this massive, devastating loss, or at the very least, not finding a way to prevent it.
I remember those days.
That was the most devastated I have ever been in business. Feeling like I lost everything in the blink of an eye. Years of work gone, and no avenue to get it back.
I was locked out of Etsy forever, and from my perspective at the time, there was no other business model that I could succeed at. And I truly believed that.
As I started doing research, I found out that there was a slim chance I could get my account cleared and reactivated, but there was also a good chance I wouldn’t be able to ever get it back and all of my efforts would just be wasted time.
So as I was doing this research, I started learning how many people have had this same issue with Etsy. And I ended up making a brave and bold decision not to pursue getting my account back.
Instead, I chose to dream of another avenue and to stop telling myself that I couldn’t succeed any other way. And I chose to start learning new things.
Now here I am a couple years later, and I have my business running on my own website so that that can never happen again and I don’t have to be at the mercy of a platform like Etsy.
My business is so much better now than it ever was or could have been on Etsy.
In the end, that failure, or set-back, became a set-up for success that I couldn’t have achieved on Etsy, and it launched me into trying things that I never otherwise would have tried.
So guys, that was my biggest failure (yet) in business, and how I was able to bounce back from it, and in fact use it for my own advantage.
So don’t quit when you fail. Don’t give up when you’re discouraged.
Because as Babe Ruth said, “It’s hard to beat a person who never gives up.”
So you guys, that’s all I have for today, but I truly hope this was helpful to you.
I’m so honored that you took your time to be here, and until next time, just remember that you are loved, you are not alone, and you’ve got this.