100 Business Days Out: Day 38 - Poke in the Eye

Today was started at a breakfast with an entrepreneur who I respect highly. This is a guy who from a young age when he came to this country learned how to run businesses. He and his father started and ran a chain of truck stops in North Carolina while he was growing up. Later he came to Silicon Valley and in his six years here he has run, started and closed, bought and successfully sold a number of companies. Some with early and great success, others where there was the swift kill before taking money from others. While he was checking in on me over breakfast and how I am doing, he said something very profound and meaningful to me. He said, "Rusty, i know it hurts, but a poke in the eye was good for you". Yes, he is right, that does hurt on a number of levels, but at the end of the day, he is right. While success definitely begets success (which I have been blessed with many times over in my career) so does the learning one has when the ball didn't make it out of the park as expected. While failure is never desired, a poke in the eye heals and does do some good. Even better is having someone talk openly about it in a non-judgemental way. In the valley, you always hear, "you aren't good unless you have some failures to show along the way". While that sounds goods on the surface, there is still from most, that look on the face, the missing gleam in the eye and the rightful questions that come from the explanations of what could have been done better. Later in the day I was on the phone with another entrepreneur who I respect and invested money in his company, I lost it but would invest again in him. I was telling him about the poke in the eye and while we both agreed that no one wants one, having one doesn't mean a "black eye" and if it does it is only for a little while and like a real black eye it goes away with time. I haven't spent much of my time looking backwards or spending time on the "ifs and buts" but I will say that in even this short amount of processing time, that I would rather have had the poke in the eye than never to have tried and I hope that no one ever shy away from the opportunity step out and lead or found something because of what might be on the other side. We are born through procreation and to create is at the root of who we are. Let us all drop our guards and use our hands (and minds) and if that means we get poked in the eye...then just bring it on.