DREAMS > GOALS
When successful business owners talk about the lessons of 2008, the main takeaway I get is that “the people who make it through are real entrepreneurs and the people who quit and never return to owning a business were fake entrepreneurs”.
I don’t believe it.
Many businesses will not recover from the financial strain of this virus, and sadly the business owner may never start another business.
But, I don’t believe this is because they were a fake.
I believe it is because they didn’t have a big enough dream.
Here we are in May 2020, and in a period of 60 days we have gone from the best economy in history to 99% of small business owners struggling to make ends meet.
Nobody could have predicted a virus would be the thing that forced small business owners to close their doors.
At 34 years old this is the first real crisis I have been through as “an entrepreneur”. In 2008 when the “housing crisis” sunk the economy I was just graduating from college and with the dream of becoming a professional basketball player pumping through my veins, I was completely oblivious to the financial toll it had taken.
There have been times during the last 60 days that I have wanted to quit. Physically and emotionally it has been one of the most difficult times of my life, but the reason I will continue is because of the lessons I learned when pursuing a professional basketball career.
My dream from being 12 years old was to play in the NBA. In my mind I was a professional athlete and everything I was going through was necessary for me to continue to follow my dream. In order to support the dream I had to paint houses (the worst job of them all), landscape gardens in 110 degree heat, I even dug graves and wiped arses.
I had a masters degree in Psychology, but those higher profile and higher paying jobs wouldn’t allow me to workout 6-8 hours per day.
While I was painting, planting, digging and wiping I was still following my dream, and so every morning I bounced out of bed. All the difficulties I was facing were not going to stop me, they were just part of my story.
I finished my basketball career playing in 8 different countries all over the globe and guarded some of the best basketball players in the world.
Now my dream is to not only have the the best gyms in the world but to also own a sports franchise, become a NY Times bestselling author and a professional public speaker.
No matter what happens during this pandemic, we may lose everything and have to start from scratch, but one thing is for sure, my dreams are too big to allow me to quit.
We know it can be difficult to find the time to dream and dreams can get lost in the day to day grind.