The vast majority of business owners spend their entire careers struggling, going from one failure to another, working harder and harder for longer and longer, just to keep their heads above water and scrape a living together.
A well-intentioned, dumb game.
Even the much smaller percentage who reach the “dizzy heights” of a comfortable income are crippled by the same challenge as the perennial strugglers. That’s why, despite earning a reasonable living, they still live like the proverbial hamster on the wheel, running faster and faster watching their life get increasingly consumed by the business, all in the name of maintaining their standard of living.
I’ve got friends who live like this. They’re stressed to the hilt and their physical bodies reflect it with a host of ailments – IBS, constant lethargy, the list goes on. They don’t own a business, they own a job with the extra risk and responsibility that comes with being the boss at the same time. They’ve taken all the risk but the reward of financial certainty and freedom is as elusive as ever.
And that’s how it will always will be for those who remain ignorant to, or those who choose to be willfully ignorant, of the ultimate cause and effect relationship in life. Until the light comes on and the proverbial penny final drops, the disgraceful statistical facts of entrepreneurial life will remain unbelievably lopsided.
By way of reminder (and I don’t think you can be reminded of these stats enough) just 1% of the world’s business owners are millionaires, a statistic that’s remained unchanged since the mid-1950’s when a million was the equivalent of £8.2 million today.
To add a little further perspective, despite every bust and boom cycle in the economy in the last sixty years, despite the age of the internet, globalisation and the dot com boom, those sorrowful statistics haven’t altered a jot. Now if that doesn’t prove – without any shadow of a doubt – we’re going about things in completely the wrong way, I don’t know what does. And if it doesn’t prove how, from generation to generation, the overwhelming majority fail to address the only challenge getting in the way of every well-intentioned, hard-working business owner and the financial and lifestyle freedom of the entrepreneurial dream, I don’t know what does.
Do you know what the real tragedy of all of this is? It’s all so unnecessary. And completely avoidable. History proves it. As so does the present. The evidence to support the claim is irrefutable. And overwhelming. In every generation, including our own, a significant percentage of the ultra successful Top 0.1% – not just the successful 1% – are self-made, rags to riches, or lower-middle class to riches individuals.
And still the underachieving masses turn a blind eye. Still they refuse to accept the possibility for themselves. And still they refuse to acknowledge the consequences of their choices, for no new reality has ever come from a mind lacking possibility.
The challenge is universal to all to varying degrees. It’s hardly a secret, is it? And it’s hardly rocket science either. But it might as well be both given how most business owners spend an entire career burying their heads in the sand to avoid it, preferring instead to plod on blindly in the utterly futile hope it’ll all change for the better at some point.
It never does. It never has. It never will.
Total responsibility is a step too far for most people. In most people’s lives responsibility is applied situationally. To varying degrees they’ll take responsibility for many things in their lives – apart from the one that requires them to own the ultimate cause-and-effect relationship in their lives.
The strugglers, underachievers and comfortably mediocre of entrepreneurial life aren’t willing to face the truth that they are the cause of every effect in their lives. Oh sure they’ll give the notion a ton of lip service. And no doubt they grasp it intellectually. But they don’t believe it. And I know they don’t because it doesn’t show up in their behaviour. You won’t find it in the choices or decisions they make. And whatever’s absent in belief and the choices, decision and behaviour that belief sponsors, will forever be absent in results. It’s just the way it is.
The undeniable and, for many, unpalatable truth is the underachieving masses bring their misery, frustration, and failure onto themselves. They don’t want to face the fact that they are the problem within their problems. And so their problems perpetuate. For an entire career in many cases. The only reason why business owners, in such astonishingly large numbers, fail to enjoy the rich pickings possible from the choice to be an entrepreneur is because they’re not willing to get themselves out of the way.
They’re not willing to unlearn the habitual ways of thinking that keep them incarcerated to the existing conditions and circumstances of their lives. They’re not willing to question their existing beliefs. And if you’re not willing to question your existing beliefs, you can’t modify them. And if you fail to modify your beliefs, you can’t modify the thinking and behaviour your beliefs sponsor. And if you can’t modify the thinking and behaviour your beliefs sponsor, you can never modify your results.
Nothing can, or will, change for you.
Welcome to the uncensored, stark reality of life for us all. There are no exceptions. Make no mistake, you get what you are…and you will get what you become. And the sooner you OWN this indisputable truth, rather than just intellectually buy into it, the sooner you’ll remove yourself from the well-trodden path by making choices and decisions most business owners won’t make.
Wealth and success is a choice. And it’s always the contrarian one. The vast majority are too “busy” burying their heads in the sand, ignoring the ultimate cause-and-effect relationship in their lives, recreating the same results over and over again (the results they’d love to change). And still they wonder, despite their plans for glory and all the blood, sweat and tears they put in to make it happen, why this elusive experience called greater success avoids them like the plague.
You make your bed in life and then you lie in it. What’s your choice to be?
Christian Simpson is the UK’s leading coach and mentor to business owners and entrepreneurs. For COMPLIMENTARY ACCESS to tried, tested and proven entrepreneurial success strategies, click here
