Nobody Else Gets To Decide If You Failed

I tell people I started three companies and each of them were acquired by public conglomerates, and that’s correct, but I always leave out one thing, which is the fourth company. That fourth company did well for a few years and then it crashed and burned. I won’t give you the details, but I was telling another entrepreneur about it today.

And, the fact is, that one day I had to fire 35 people. It was a bad day, a really bad day. My wife at the time, and I ended up getting separated that week too. So what would’ve been a bad day, was a bad time in my life and I felt like a failure.

The reality is, after I sold my first company, I was 30 years old, maybe 29.

I felt like a failure then too. I felt like I didn’t achieve what I wanted to.

I felt like I couldn’t achieve what I wanted to, that I couldn’t do what other people did.

And that’s why now I cringe when people say someone either succeeded or failed. And you hear it all the time about entrepreneurs. He sold his company so he succeeded. She didn’t IPO. So the whole thing was a failure.

I was talking to a client today who has an early stage business. Been going for a couple years. It’s doing fairly well, but still trying to find its footing.

Suddenly, over the last month or two,