How to be a successful entrepreneur – be resilient and empowered.
Jan, a highly successful entrepreneur, endured tremendous hardships throughout life, including both of her parents dying before she was 6 years old. Later, in corporate America, she banged her head on the glass ceiling early — being a woman … without a college degree. So Jan started her own business, building it to 40 employees. Things were going well until her company exposed a Fortune 500 company’s unethical business practice and wanted to cover it up. In their cover up this company attacked and destroyed Jan’s company.
Jan was a mentally tough, resilient, empowered entrepreneur, never the victim, Jan started over with a new idea and rebuilt her company to 70 employees, this time offering different services; she had learned how to be a successful entrepreneur and grow a company.
But years later she again faced adversity — she caught her CFO embezzling and the police caught him flashing women from his window. Then her chief technology officer turned out to be a feared rapist. Regarding all her adversity, Jan said with a laugh: “TC, you can’t make this s*it up.”
When I asked Jan how she stayed positive and kept going forward, she told me this story: “When my parents died, I was adopted by my mother’s best friend and her husband, who were farmers. I remember standing with my adopted dad watching a hail storm completely destroy our corn crop, which was about 4 inches high.
When the storm was over, my dad just walked along the rows of destroyed corn and said, ‘I guess we’ll have to replant.’ I just live my life the way I learned on the farm.” Farmers can teach you how to be a resilient successful entrepreneur.
Neither Jan nor her father ever felt victimized; they took responsibility for creating positive outcomes. They didn’t waste their energy blaming; they took positive action … and replanted when necessary. Jan was truly an empowered entrepreneur.
“The evasion of responsibility is the major cause
of most people’s frustrations and defeats.”
–Ayn Rand, author, philosopher
