Your Inner CEO: Confidence, man! Confidence!

There’s something inherently heroic about being in business for yourself. It’s the romance of risk taking and the refusal to compromise your dreams for the sake of security. There are also some less purely philosophical rewards for entrepreneurship. As your own boss you can set your own hours. You can take a day off or even a vacation whenever you want. And whatever profits the business makes belong to you alone.

That’s the upside. The not-so-upside is the huge amount of work it takes in order to achieve success. Research shows that most entrepreneurs put in far more than the standard forty hour week. And just as you get the credit (and the profits) for everything that goes right, you also get the blame (and the loss) for whatever goes wrong. So entrepreneurship is definitely not for sissies. The vast majority of entrepreneurs fail before they succeed. There will be lots of false starts before you cross the finish line.

Reserve energy is essential. It’s the ability to keep trying even when you’ve tried and failed. It’s also the power to see when the time has come to let go and try something else. Both those qualities are rare, but the second may be even more unusual than the first.

Not everyone is cut out to play in the National Basketball Association -- especially guys who are five foot nine. Lots of people sing in the shower, but only a few will sing for the Metropolitan Opera. Thinking about this, you will enter a murky area in which inner and outer reality ram into each other. It can be hard to exchange an impractical dream for a more feasible one, doing that is not the same thing as surrender. It may mean learning from your mistakes. It may or may not mean giving up on a certain undertaking, but it means never giving up on yourself.

Having said that, when you do make a promise from the heart -- especially to yourself – many, many worthy goals are achievable regardless of the evidence of the moment. 

It may not happen immediately. In fact, it probably won’t. You’ll make mistakes in your business, in your relationships, and in all other areas of your life. Setbacks are going to happen in. Some of them will be your responsibility. Other times someone else may be at fault. But blame and a victim mentality just waste time and energy. 

Confidence is knowing that you will succeed. If it doesn’t happen today, it will happen tomorrow.  If it doesn't come with this project, it will come with the next one. Confidence is knowing that you can acquire whatever skills and knowledge you do not yet possess.  It is knowing that you are capable of working hard and are tenacious enough to go the distance, however far that may be. It is knowing that as much as you appreciate the cheerleaders in your life, that you would keep going even if nobody believed in you, And sometimes nobody will believe in you. You can be confident of that.