Making success your only option

Some one once asked me, “why is it that the most successful business men down town are uneducated? What is it about them that makes them succeed way more likely than their educated counterparts?” By educated they meant formal schooling.

I told him it was simple, options. The reason they succeed is because they have no other option.The more options you have, the less your resolve will be studies show. When humans get to place where it’s either that or nothing they will always go hard. It’s literally like being cornered. Unlike their educated counterparts, the uneducated business owners have only one option, to succeed at business. Getting a job when the business fails is not an option because they don’t have the requirements (papers) to get one.

The educated can pursue a career or can start business. If you are an accountant and you start a business and it fails, you can always go find a job some where as an accountant. There’s a fall back position for you something that the other business owner with no academic credentials will not have. If their business fails, they have no option of going to find a job. They have to start all over again and push harder.

Whenever people have options, it kills their resolve alittle bit. That do or die attitude kinda dies out alittle bit because at the back of their mind they know they have a fall back position, their academic papers.I will share with you a story from two years ago. There was a lady who was looking for a job and had been at it for some time. She had dropped her applications all over the place but no one was calling her with concrete interest in her. So having sat down with her husband, they decided to start her a bakery/bread shop since finding a job had become a hard feat to achieve.

She contacted us, asked that we guide her through this process of setting up her bread shop. She tasked us with doing a small market survey so she would be sure about what it would take, what kind of products she would deal in, how she would price and most importantly where she would locate this new business of hers. In the middle of the survey she called to tell us she had gotten a job offer and was going to first go do the job then she would come back to this later. That’s how the bread shop dream died a premature death. Why? Because she had another option outside the business and it was the easier option. Now imagine there was never a possibility of getting hired for her? The bakery would be two years old now.

That’s the reason why business owners with no formal schooling background end up being more successful than their learned counterparts because they have no other option save for being succesful at business and this sharpens their resolve to do so. Success becomes a do or die affair. If you ever want to be successful at something just put yourself in a position where succeeding at it is the only option you have and by success I mean big success.