Care Bears?

Have you lost your marbles?

Well I’m not sure yet, but here’s the story.

This week I was taking a break from some coding to relax a little bit with my 21 month old niece. We decided to turn on Care Bears. This specific episode is called Lucky charm. Here we see the story of a young girl with low self confidence who is taught to believe in herself and to create her own luck.

I think this is an incredibly important message not only for children but also for entrepreneurs and businesspeople alike. It’s easy for us to write-off doing something worthwhile by making excuses for ourselves or our companies. By doing so we are able to hide behind our own insecurities and never move forward, taking risk and confronting the challenges they are required to do amazing things in life and business.

It’s interesting that as adults we tend to forget these important lessons that children are taught on a daily basis. This is generally because as adults we have responsibilities that force us to be rational and conservative with the decisions we make. But what’s important is that we don’t confuse our responsibilities with our insecurities.

Being an entrepreneur is all about risk management. Trying something new whether it be a different business model or product idea requires taking a risk and the best entrepreneurs are the ones that minimize risk by laying a foundation through a solid business model or funding strategy. But even before that, the best entrepreneurs are the ones that believe in themselves. They create their own luck and write their own rules.

So if you want to be a better entrepreneur then you have to take risk. But first you need to believe in yourself and create your own luck. Unfortunately, the Care Bears are not real. They are not going to fly down in a cloud car and teach you an important life lesson. You have to do that on your own. But, in doing so it’ll make all the risk and scary moments more worthwhile.