Like for many other skills, those who aren’t entrepreneurs usually don’t understand or appreciate the difficulties entrepreneurs face to achieve the lifestyle and apparent freedom rewarding their efforts.
Entrepreneurs must manage their responsibilities to their customers, employees, investors, and bankers with no safety net.
Many times their promotional efforts don’t work. In direct marketing, these efforts are framed as “tests”. When a test fails, you just learned something that doesn’t work and try again.
A product might not perform as expected or a customer might not get the results sought when a service is performed. The entrepreneur must do what is necessary to keep the customer happy or deal with a customer who can’t be satisfied.
There isn’t time available to take a day off to recover from a failure or setback. Obligations still have to be met. The entrepreneur must either quickly deal with an emotional setback with a short set time “wallow” or box it up to deal with it later and get on with the business of the day.
In his Renegade Millionaire System, marketing teacher Dan Kennedy uses the analogy of a football quarterback. The quarterback who misses a pass or who is sacked has thirty seconds to execute the next play. He has to put his emotions aside and focus on the game. He might make a pass to the same teammate who missed it on the next play. Possibly he can reflect on his disappointment sometime after the game is over.
Although the time constraints aren’t as stringent in a business setting, the entrepreneur must develop the same trait of resilience and mental toughness to continue on despite failure and disappointment again and again.
This is not the career path for everyone.