Tenacity: What Sets You Apart
You only lose out if you give up
In a major Twitter event today, many of my writer friends are pitching manuscripts they’ve pitched before in hopes of security representation.
Querying authors I know still send out new queries to agents, even though it may take months to hear back.
One author friend who’d been working on her manuscript for years finally made it to the end. And you know what? It’s brilliant.
It seems everyone around me is going after what they want.
And it’s infectious.
Each of these authors has a better chance of success because they simply didn’t give up.
The Truth About Failure
After championing so many author friends over the past week or so, I realized that these lessons can also be applied to my business.
Freelancing can be hard work. At times it can be discouraging. But if I have services I believe in, the only way I can fail is by not trying.
How many times have you heard “80% of all new restaurants fail in their first year” or “50% of freelance businesses fail their first year”?
I wondered what the actual failure rate was.
Can you guess?
According to an article by Timothy Carter in Entrepreneur last January, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics showed the percentage of businesses that failed in the first year was:
20%.
Twenty percent of businesses board up and stop doing business by the end of the first year.
An 80% success rate? Those are much better odds.
The odds improve if we’re well-prepared before leaping into a new business.
Reading further, I found that ever-present 50%:
“By the end of the fifth year, about half will have failed.”
But What Is Failure?
Failure sounds like such a scary word.
I don’t want to fail. You probably don’t either.
Yet not every idea we have will be brilliant, not every book we write will be sold, and not every attempt we make will be a success.
Those businesses that didn’t make it past the first year?
That’s failure — failure of a business. From which we can pick ourselves up and try something new.
Maybe that next idea, or that next attempt will be a success.
Which Takes Me Back To My Author Friends
I know a writer who received a ton of rejections from agents.
I’ll never reveal her number, because that’s her story and not mine, but it would scare most people if they knew they would hear “no” that many times.
I’m sure each rejection hurt, but instead of getting frustrated, she looked for patterns in the feedback.
Then she wrote a new book, based on that feedback.
As of today, she’s what most people would consider a successful author, with book sales that make her smile.
She had the tenacity to keep going when it felt like she would never catch a break. And that’s what led to her success.
So, I can’t help but wonder if the 50% of businesses that closed after 5 years meant that the people running them found better opportunities.
Maybe that original business did fail, only for the person to learn from it, turn around, and build something successful.
Think about it: How many startups do so some people burn through until they find that one idea that takes off?
I’m sure that wasn’t the case for all of those “failed” businesses, but I can’t help but wonder if the truth behind the stats isn’t as bleak as they might appear.
Because I surround myself with people who push themselves to reach their goals, I’m not going to give up when I hit an obstacle. Neither should you.
Don’t give up — because your success might be just past your next failure.
