Flush the Toilet: Young Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs aren’t perfect. From time to time we all make mistakes but that’s just a part of the game. The road to success can be quite bumpy at times. I liken the life of an entrepreneur to a life filled with trial and error – sometimes things will workout and many times they won’t but you just have to keep on trying to make the pieces fit.

Entrepreneur’s lives are like hard math problems when you can’t find the right solution but just keeping at it until you find it, until is makes sense. There will be times when you feel like you’re on top of the world because you had a brilliant idea or got a new client and all seems to be going so well for you.

Then there will be times when it seems as though everything is falling apart. That’s always the worst feeling, as I’m sure you know. But the thing is, you just have to keep on spinning that web and connecting the dots.

There will always be people out there who want to breakdown everything that you’re about and what you’re trying to accomplish in life. There will always be doubts that enter your mind and tell you “to just give up and make your life a lot easier.” There will always be people who are competing with you instead of trying to help you when they know that they have the ability to.

Yes, there will always be these negative forces in the lives of the entrepreneur but it is vital that you build up an immune system to protect yourself from these harmful viruses. You have to constantly be thinking positive even when it seems like the world’s against you and the chances of success are slim. You can’t fall prey to the traps that are set for you to fail – the traps that are set to push you back into the masses instead of the minorities who are making things happen.

I used to work on Wall Street and while I was there I learned that the traders had a few ways of describing different investors. They described the confident and savvy investors who knew what they wanted and acted upon it to increase their financial positions “Bulls.” They described the investors who were scared to invest in certain companies because they weren’t confident or just didn’t have enough information to make accurate judgements about a particular company the “Bears.” And they called people who sat back and just watched everybody else make and lose money the “Pigs.”

So the Bulls made money, the Bears lost money because of their lack of confidence, and the Pigs just sat back and got slaughtered because they did nothing. It seemed to me that the people who really made it big on Wall Street were the people who were willing to just go for it even when all of the “Bears” advised them not to because it was a bad idea or when they attacked them for mistakes that they made along the way to success.

Entrepreneurs have to be Bulls. They have to plow right through the naysayers, the negative thinkers, and the people trying to bring them down. We’re living in a world were we are outnumbered so we have to stick together and support each other, not bring each other down.

There are so many people out there walking around with these egos of I’m-better-than-you-and-what-you’re-trying-to-do-is-shit so just give up or move aside because you’re going to get slaughtered in this business world.

There comes a time when you just have to tell yourself to work even harder when you encounter opposition. You have to isolate yourself from the negative fluff and motivate yourself to grow even further and push even harder.

Student entrepreneurs, more than any type of entrepreneur, are susceptible to this type of treatment because people feel that they can step all over a person because they have years on them, because they’ve been around longer than them, or because they are already established and we aren’t.

You know what I say to that? SO WHAT! Yes, I will respect you because you’ve been around and have done things that I haven’t even come close to doing yet, but if you think for one second that I’m going to backdown from fulfilling my goals as an entrepreneur, then you better start rethinking your strategies of how to put down budding entrepreneurs.

We are a force that simply can’t be stopped. Student entrepreneurs are getting stronger and stronger by they day. Yes we are young, but that doesn’t mean that our ideas are weaker than yours or that what we have to say is less important than what you do.

So just keep doing what you’re doing and try not to fall victim to the mobs of negative thinkers, the mistakes that you will make, and the doubts of becoming successful that will enter your mind. These are all just pieces to the puzzle, so put them in their place and continue playing the game until the picture is complete.