Take Risks Early in Your Career
When I was 22 years old, I struck up a conversation with a businessman on a flight from New York to Detroit. As we made our initial descent to the airport, I asked him what kind of advice he would give someone my age.
After thinking for a moment, he said: “Take most of your risks in business while you’re young, for you can more easily recover if things go badly. The older you get, the more complicated life gets, and risk becomes much harder to stomach.”
It was great advice, which I still share with entrepreneurs who ask me for help today. You are going to have setbacks at some point in your business or in your life. In the final analysis, though, failure is not about the falling down but about the staying down. The ability to get back up over and over again will set you apart from those who doubt your abilities or tell you that your ideas are unsound.
My feeling has always been that these are the same people who don’t understand risks, courage, and the power of doing more than is expected of you.
