In Through The Out Door

<p>
In basketball you have to shoot
50pct. If you make an extra 10 shots per hundred, you are an All-Star. In
baseball
you have to get a hit 30 pct of
the time. If you get an extra 10 hits per hundred at bats, you are on the cover
of
every magazine, lead off every
SportsCenter and make the Hall of Fame.

<p>In Business, the odds are a
little different. You don&#8217;t have to break the Mendoza line (hitting
.200). In fact, it
doesnt matter how many
times you strike out. In business, to be a success, you only have to be right
once.</p>

<p>One
single solitary time and you are set for life. That&#8217;s the beauty of
the business world.</p>

<p>I like to tell the story of how I started my first business at age 12,
selling garbage bags. No one ever has asked

if I was any good or made money at it. I was, and I did&hellip;enough to buy
some tennis shoes :).</p>

<p>I like to tell the story of how I started&nbsp;up a bar,
Motley&#8217;s Pub when I wasn&#8217;t even of legal drinking age
the
summer before my senior year at Indiana
University. No one really asks me how it turned out. It was great until
we
got busted for letting a 16-year-old win
a wet t-shirt contest (I swear I checked her ID, and it was
good!).</p>

<p>No
one really asks me about my adventures working for Mellon Bank, or Tronics 2000,
or trying to start a business
selling
powdered milk (it was cheaper by the gallon, and I thought it tasted good). They
don&#8217;t ask me about working
as a
bartender at night at Elans when I first got to Dallas, or getting fired from my
job at Your Business Software
for wanting
to close a sale rather than sweeping the floor and opening up the
store.</p>

<p>No
ever asked me about what it was like when I started MicroSolutions and how I
used to count the months I was in
business,
hoping to outlast my previous endeavors and make this one a
success.</p>

<p>With every effort, I learned a lot. With every mistake and failure, not
only mine, but of those around me, I

learned what not to do. I also got to study the success of those I did business
with as well. I had more than a
healthy
dose of fear, and an unlimited amount of hope, and more importantly, no limit on
time and effort.</p>

<p>Fortunately, things turned out well for me with MicroSolutions. I sold
it after 7 years and made enough money to

take time off and have a whole lot of
fun.</p>

<p>Back
then I can remember vividly people telling me how lucky I was to sell my
business at the right
time.</p>

<p>Then
when I took that money and started trading technology stocks that were in the
areas that MIcroSolutions
focused
on.&nbsp;I remember vividly being told how lucky I was to have expertise in
such a hot area, as technology
stocks
started to trade up.</p>

<p>Of course, no one wanted to comment on how lucky I was to spend time
reading software manuals, or Cisco Router

manuals, or sitting in my house testing and comparing new technologies, but
that&#8217;s a topic for another blog
post.</p>

<p>The
point of all this is that it doesn&#8217;t matter how many times you
fail.&nbsp;It doesn&#8217;t matter how many times
you
almost get it right.&nbsp;No one is
going to know or care about your failures, and either should you. All you have
to
do is learn from them and those around
you
because&hellip;</p>

<p>All that matters in business is that you get it right
once.</p>

<p>Then
everyone can tell you how lucky you
are.</p>

</p>

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