When facing hard times, READING to educate, inform and inspire yourself to weather the storms of your life WILL help you. However, WRITING about your experiences CAN help you even more – as I explain below.
I say this from over 10 years of personal experience…
For over a decade as an entrepreneur, I have repeatedly overcome prolonged periods of heart breaking struggles in my pursuit of personal achievement and success.
When delays, disappointments, setbacks and failure relentlessly come at you as sometimes happens in life, there is a serious tendency to get overwhelmed.
Even the strongest of us can get demoralized and disillusioned when hard times hit!
Indeed, persons who others normally look upon for inspiration and encouragement, being human themselves, sometimes in their life also end up needing others to do just that for them too.
And if they do not get it, that could mark the onset of a downturn in their fortunes. NOT because they lack the physical ability or strength to recover, but because they are mentally and/or emotionally spent, or defeated.
You may have heard about the principle used by martial arts practitioners about winning a fight without even fighting.
In other words, you can defeat an opponent mentally before you have to engage him/her physically.
How?
Simply by doing things that either make him/her lose self-confidence or interest. Once you can successfully create such an internal state of affairs in the mind of your opponent, his/her ability to focus on the task of winning against you becomes much more difficult.
Generally in warfare or confrontation, the above principle is used successfully by smart warriors or fighters.
Muhammad Ali is one famous example of a fighter who use psychological warfare as a weapon to weaken his opponent before the actual fight took place in the right.
I doubt that I need to give you examples of what that great man did, and how. Most of us readily recall them. He’s a legend today because of how he did it.
We can all learn by reading about people like Muhammad, and how they came back from defeat, and exposure to prolonged periods of adversity. Just like Ali did through those years of being stripped of his title and banned from boxing, to come back and WIN again.
I have done that, and as one writer noted, I discovered that reading does indeed help to “strengthen the mind”.
However, I also discovered that writing about my experiences, especially based on what I read, and the lessons I learnt, had a powerful healing effort on me.
That brings me to the message of this article.
You see, I got to a point in reading a wide range of books that there were gems of insight and experience based wisdom, anecdotes etc, that I wanted to be able to read and re-read those “special sections” without having to flip through each book all over again to find them.
Some of the books included the following…
1. Napoleon Hills’ Think and Grow Rich, and Success Through a Positive Mental Attitude
2. How to Win Friends and Influence People – by Dale Carnegie
3. The Startup Entrepreneur – by James R. Cook
4. How to Succeed in Business by Breaking All The Rules – by Dan Kennedy.
…and several others
Each book at different stage of my life as an entrepreneur, offered me useful inspiration and education that helped me keep going in spite of hardships I encountered.
I found myself using highlight pens – very often – to mark specific sections I wanted to remember…
One day it occurred to me that I could extract those special “blocks of text” from each book and condense them into a separate document for my personal consumption. That way I would be able to come back and reread them as often as I needed to, whenever I felt down.
The idea to do this came to me one day as I reread the final chapter in James Cook’s book in which he admonished to reader, to pick up and read Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich ANYTIME s/he felt like giving up. He assured that doing so would help him/her rediscover the sense of purpose, inspiration and passion to keep going – adding that THAT was what he did, that led him to eventual success.
I realized that I had several books in which certain sections really helped me, each time I read them.
So I began typing them into an MS Word document that I names Starting a Business – the theme reflecting the phase I was passing through.
As the weeks progressed, I soon discovered that I was inadvertently adding my personal experiences in my writing, to support the excerpts I was taking from the book.
At a point, it occurred to me that beyond helping myself, I could deliberately continue writing in a way that would enable me help others.
This was because most of the experiences I was having were what I knew others had had in the past, and which many more would still have.
Yet, nothing in the Nigerian marketplace – books especially – really offered any formal guiding philosophy for them to follow.
I felt I could use myself as a guinea pig to fill that gap.
Over a 2 and half month period I continued writing based on the experiences that had made me extract those book excerpts.
Then I would append the excerpts at relevant points in my writing, sharing relevant explanations and insights.
By the time I was done, I have typed almost 80 pages!
I then read through and edited it, till I was satisfied – splitting the contents into chapters, and naming them according to the key lessons I felt each one taught me.
Later on, I rephrased the titles as “mistakes” to be avoided. More and more, I began to see the 80 page document as a book.
One day, after reading through it again and getting the much needed relief, the thought occurred to me that the book was helping me SURVIVE the hardships of my new life as an entrepreneur.
That was when I knew I could help others. If the book did that for me, then it could do the same for others. So, I called it the Entrepreneurs Survival Reference Manual. That basically described how I had been using it.
However, I soon made that the subtitle and instead adopted what I considered a more catchy title: 25 Avoidable Mistakes No One Will Warn You About In Starting Your OWN Business – in Nigeria.
However, my desire to help others made me include an offer on the cover I designed, of a FREE 4 hour workshop, for all buyers of the app.
That FREE Workshop offer remains open to this day – especially with the growing wave of interest in entrepreneurship now happening (click here to request details)
More schools and universities are including some form of entrepreneurship education/training in their formal curricula.
We are seeing more and more Centers of Entrepreneurship Development springing up.
I however believe most of them need to get REAL life authentic entrepreneurs to come in as external facilitators (at the least).
This will give their students an accurate impression of what awaits them in the real world, when they “graduate” – and HOW to survive, until they can flourish and excel.
Right now, it appears not much of that is happening.
Maybe they are having a hard time finding authentically successful entrepreneurs who are willing, or available.
By way of this article I announce that I am willing and available to play such a role with interested organizations (terms apply).
As for other entrepreneurs who may struggle to do same, I recommend you consider using the approach of writing as a form of self-therapy, that I’ve described here.
It will help you “create” a formal body of original material you can use to offer YOUR own experience based information, education and inspiration to aspiring others!
