__When you get knocked down, get back
up.
Sometimes in life, you get knocked down
by something you do not expect, despite
all your advance planning and hard work.
It can be heartbreaking. In London last
week at the IAAF World Championships,
a virus knocked several athletes out of
their events. Some had trained for years
and even decades for that big day, then
didn’t even get a chance to compete
and lose… they had to watch from the
sidelines, even worse!
A few athletes came back to win glorious
Gold Medals after years of injuries. Others
were expected to get the Gold in historic
races but didn’t, maybe getting “only” a
Silver or Bronze… And then there’s what
happened in the last race of the great
running legend Usain Bolt… who just
literally got knocked to the ground by
a hamstring cramp as I was starting to
think about this next post.
Life when things like this happen can be
heart-wrenching.
The choice of what you do next is what
ultimately determines your destiny
— whether in business, in sport, or
wherever you are or do in life.
Sometimes it’s entirely out of your
control, like an illness or injury, drought
or earthquake, or even a war. Other
times, it’s you and you alone who made
a wrong judgment call.
The late writer Maya Angelou once said
something like this: “You will face many
defeats in your life, but never let yourself
be defeated.”
# Never let yourself be defeated.
If you want the “thrill of victory” as the
old saying goes from the Wide World
of Sports, you have to be prepared to
bounce back from the agony of defeat,
time and again.
If you choose to turn your small business
into a big business, one thing I can
guarantee is that things will not always
turn out like you planned, and things will
definitely go wrong from time to time.
You may lose for a short while or even
for a long while, but…
# Never let yourself be defeated.
The main difference between most of
the greatest characters in history and
everyone else? The choices they made
after they got knocked down.
Notice I keep saying the word “choose.”
Getting back up is a choice. “Course
correcting” when you need to, is a choice.
Giving up is a choice. Innovating is a
choice. Remembering that your business
must have a life separate from you, like
we talked about a few weeks ago, that is
a choice, too…
What do YOU think are main differences
between a business destined to stay
small and one that eventually grows
huge? I can tell you one: Mindset.
__If you get knocked down, you must
choose to get back up:
# Re-do your homework.
# Seek advice from credible and
trusted people, and don’t just listen
to what you want to hear.
# Reflect and re-analyze.
# Extract the valuable lessons
learned.
# Dust yourself off, if you haven’t
already!
# Then move forward, onward and
upward, this time with more wisdom
and experience.
This is how you will transform your small
business into an institution.
To be continued. . .

By Strive Masiyiwa

www.econet.bi