The life as an entrepreneur

I'm 33.5 years old now. And I feel that I am starting from scratch once again. Back in 2006, I had the privilege to start my first real company. And after a year of relentless dedication, I saw the fruits of my labor as we started to generate money from something I created out of nothing. What I never told many people was that the motivation to start and work so hard in creating something came from a few audiobooks that I listened to. First one was Personal Power II by Anthony Robbins. And the other one being John C. Maxwell's 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership. I've listened to a lot of audiobooks since, but these 2 were the most important ones for me. The information in Personal Power II, is really incredible stuff. My reasoning was, if he can help Andre Agassi, Serena Williams, Princess Diana, Wayne Gretzky, Nelson Mandela, Mother Teresa, Bill Clinton, numerous fortune 500 CEO's, he probably knows something that I don't know. And he probably can get me some pointers.

For me, there were countless mind blowing revelations on how the most successful people in the world empower themselves to get everything they set their mind to, and combat all the things that get in their way. So if you're wondering how I got motivated to literally jump out of bed and work on a company for 18 hours a day, 7 days a week, and sustain that crazy motivation for over a year until I had a product that was ready to sell, there you have it.

The audiobooks I was listening to at the time were telling me, no one achieves success with their first company, and if you try and fail, you just ran a play and it didn't work out. The game is not over as long as you are alive. But as the large checks started rolling in, and we were looking to get a lot more, I kept saying to myself, "wow, I am so fortunate that my first company is successful. I guess I'm one of the lucky ones."

Well, long story short, my first company didn't work out. Many lessons learned. Lessons I would have never learned without going through the process. And by the end of that chapter in my life, I grew as a person immensely. And I'm proud of what I accomplished. But did I jump out of bed the next day saying, "no problem, this is what I'm going to do next"? No. With all the knowledge I've gained on how to handle crisis, no one said experiencing failure after you've given your soul was easy. I took a break for over a year soul searching, traveling, and taught English in Korea for a year. During that time, my dad passed away, and I realized it was time to get back to reality and continue on my journey I had set for myself more than 5 years ago.

The life as an entrepreneur is committing yourself 100% (not 80%, not 99.9%, but 100%), working smart, and working hard until you get what you want. There is no plan B. If plan A doesn't work out after you've given and tried everything, it is only then you make a new plan A. Dust yourself off because life is about to hike the ball to you once again.

I am listening to the audiobooks once again because there are many things I have forgotten about. But I realized that since the information feels more of a refresher, I am not as focused, but I should be. Having great knowledge, but not using it, doesn't really do anything. I am depriving myself the benefits of this information by not being focused. So I plan on using my blog, or at least a private blog, to try to extract every once of what these programs could offer.

This is where I am now. Beginning a new chapter. I'm working on something bigger, better, very different, but incorporating every lesson I've learned along the way. Watch out world!