Carolyn Jack

Editor and CEO, Geniocity.com
A project of The Genius Group LLC

Creative Nerve: What It’s Really Like to Start a Business

Keep going, even when you can’t. The whole culture of the business world amounts to can-do optimism. Back in the Roaring Twenties era of Sinclair Lewis’s “Babbitt,” the word for it was pep. People who didn’t have it were dreary, defeatist weenies.

Not much has changed, I think. The business community sympathizes with failure if it’s a manly, go-down-fighting, heroic kind of failure. But it recoils from despair. Despair and desperation are for dimwitted crybabies who don’t have the cunning or sheer guts to tough their way through. You can complain about whatever goes wrong and agitate for a better deal and business people will admire you for it as long as you’re forceful. But let your shoulders slump or your lip quiver and there’s suddenly as big a circle of cleared floor around you as if you had “Leper” stenciled on your shirt. 

You don’t have to have dissolved in tears on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange to know this.

So you have to get out of bed every day and make those phone calls and keep those appointments, even when you’d rather just wind yourself in the sheet and be carried out. You have to think of your entrepreneurial struggle as less Bataan Death March and more the conquering of Everest.

You don’t want to. I know. 

So here are some things to get you out of bed every day when bed feels like your last handhold above the crater of nervous collapse:

1) Fuzzy teeth – This is the bell and your dentist is Pavlov. Don’t even pretend you can lie there when you know you have to brush.

2) Breakfast – Your stomach gets a vote, too, even though you’re telling it that your brain is the only body part registered. Climb out and eat (is there pie ?!) But do it before you de-fuzz those fangs.

3) Money – Do you want to have anything in the house for breakfast? Do you want to have a house? 

4) Kids – Yeah, you need to earn money for them, too. But more important, if you lie in bed long enough, they’ll come join you there and then you’ll never get any peace, particularly if they bring the portable DVD player and eight seasons worth of “Family Guy” with them.

5) Your calendar – Is it today or tomorrow that the plumber’s coming to replace the stack in the upstairs bathroom? Surely, it was tomor… Damn. It’s today. It’s today, isn’t it?  

6) Humiliation – Never underestimate the power of worrying what your friends and neighbors and associates and clients and large judgmental family will say if you wimp out now. And if that doesn’t goose you out from under your down quilt, just wait till they start phoning you with advice.