What’s Your Rubber Band?
This is a guest post by Brian Lash who can be found at his entrepreneurial blog BrianLash.com (feed).
I wear a rubber band around my wrist. No, it’s not one of the ubiquitous Livestrong bracelets, or one with a trendy “This is our house” declaration of the Under Armor brand’s variety. Mine is a simple, tan-colored elastic band. The kind you would find sealing a plastic bag, or wrapping a poster, or holding a deck of playing cards.
People ask me about it all the time; “Why do you wear that?” and “Doesn’t it pull at the hairs on your arm?” They ask, and sometimes I tell them.
Other times I don’t bother. After all, most people aren’t entrepreneurs… they wouldn’t understand. But I’m making a bet you will:
A few months ago a friend talked to me about the Director of the Entrepreneurial Studies Program at a local university. He’s a successful entrepreneur who has started some 12 companies (10 of them successful) in his lifetime, and he teaches today for the reward of inspiring young entrepreneurs to follow their passion. You can imagine that this guy – we’ll call him Professor Hill – spent a lifetime placing big bets. On companies. On life.
Some of them were wise, as is evidenced by his 10-for-12 company record. And then some of them…
You can guess the rest of the story. Professor Hill developed an addiction for betting big. He lived for the chase, pursued the uninhibited thrill of the win.
Then one day it caught up with him. And to the tune of $50,000 (that’s £25,500 using today’s exchange rate).
Ouch.
What did Professor Hill do next? He vowed to never, ever again gamble away his money. And he sealed the promise to himself with a rubber band worn on his wrist.
That was decades ago. Today Professor Hill is worth tens of millions of dollars (or pounds). He runs one of the United States’ largest talk radio shows on the entrepreneurial experience. He’s published widely.
And he still wears his rubber band.
That story struck a cord worth me, both because Professor Hill is a rags-to-riches success story, and because he adopted something so simple – the rubber band – as a lasting reminder of the promise he made to himself. And it worked.
Today I wear a rubber band on my wrist to remind myself of my own promise: That I’m an entrepreneur – authentically and unapologetically. That I won’t let any critic tell me otherwise. And that I’ll remember this pledge to myself until I build a company that proves nay-sayers wrong.
I bet you don’t think that’s so cheesy. In fact, you may have a rubber band of your own. Not a visible piece of rubber that you wear around your wrist, no. But something that reminds you to stay the course in the face of adversity.
Maybe you blast your mp3 player and lose yourself in your favorite music. Maybe you visit blogs so you can network with like-minded entrepreneurs who intimately know the entrepreneurs’ journey, and who will support you in your own. Maybe you just daydream about your own success. At any rate, you do something. Why not share it here?
What’s your rubber band?
