3 Tips to remain strong during the “crisis”
Facebook 534, Twitter: 35, Linkedin: 34. If you’re asking what are those numbers, they represent how valuable are those projects for certain people (in millions dollars invested!!). Those are just a couple of samples of how much funding can get a web project. But how far is going to be yours?
I always liked to merge entrepreneurship with leadership. I think that an entrepreneur needs to be a good leader to be successful, and a leader by default, is generating new things all the time, he’s taking people to places that they couldn’t go alone (sometimes they couldn’t even imagine to be there) and that’s done by being creative, by looking forward, and staying sharp as a leader.
But “generate new things” it’s not the only job for an entrepreneur. The reason that companies like Facebook went so far, or that startups like Twitter or LinkedIn are going so far in the middle of this crisis, it’s not because they’re lucky, but it’s because they’re leading the process which includes overcoming difficult times.
I have failed sometimes in the past, even when there were great forecasts announcing really high revenues, I saw great ideas die after a hard reality hit them. But I reject to talk about this “crisis” that everybody’s talking about, I prefer to say “Silence, I kill you” (see Achmed video for reference) to the idea of a global crisis because the way we talk, the things we say, the conversations that we maintain have impact in our reality, that’s why I always prefer to talk about possibility. We need to understand our reality, but as entrepreneurs, as leaders, as people that live on the cutting edge technology we must talk about a possible future, always.
There’s a very interesting principle that the ontology studies which says something like: “The human being is a linguistic being”, which means that the second thing that we do all the time after thinking is talking. That said, we really need to think about what we’re saying!.
The second principle that I learned, is that “the language is a reality generator tool”, every time you declare something with your mouth, you’re generating changes, when a judge says Jail to somebody, he’s changing somebody else’s life. The same happens when you declare that you’re done with something, that 2009 is not the best year to start anything, or to invest time on anything. When you say that kind of things you’re actually “jailing yourself”, probably without being aware of that.
I always remember three advices that helped me be strong in those “critical times” in the past.
1) “If somebody did it before, then you can make it”. When I see countries rising up after very long wars, or after horrible events like 9/11, when I see them strong again, I think that’s a miracle, but it’s not. Whenever you feel like you can’t keep up, whenever you feel that you have spent too much effort on your project without any reward, think about this kind of events, they will show you that there’s nothing impossible, that there’s not a situation that you can’t overcome if you really strive with a strong entrepreneur’s vision, being focused on the future.
2) “A leader is never dropped, he’s always rising up”. As I said I had difficult times in the past, times where I didn’t have even one dollar for the bus to go to a meeting. But you can’t quit just because you feel tired, you can’t forget about your vision because it’s difficult to keep up. Leave your projects when you feel that it’s done, when you feel that the time has passed to that idea, but not because you’re holding fear about the future, or because someone else is saying you can’t.
3) “Go get the opportunity, don’t wait for it”. It starts in your language, it’s starts in your brain where you let your thoughts exist. Don’t believe that phrase saying that the opportunity comes next to the crisis. The real entrepreneurs are those who generate the opportunity with their efforts, their passion of what they do, and their constancy in those difficult times. You won’t find people touched by a wand, that didn’t happen to those companies that I mentioned before, they just remained strong, and as Steve Jobs said, they probably remained hungry and foolish too, that’s how they got so far!.
Two days ago I posted my goals for 2009 at Facebook and somebody told me: “isn’t that too much?”, that remembered me a great phrase that I want to share with you, specially today:
“We all live under the same sky, but we don’t all have the same horizon.”
Matias Paterlini
Article originally written for YoungTechStars.com
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