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When you start a business, the odds are against you.

Huge swaths of new businesses don’t get past their first Anniversary – not one candle on the cake to be blown out.

And it doesn’t matter how great your business model is or how passionate your first few customers are – much of the early success of a start-up can be put on the shoulders of a company’s early founders – you have to be passionate, driven, nearly manic – sometimes to the exclusion of what most would consider logical or any degree of common sense. Even people that love you (the girlfriends, boyfriends, wives, husbands and parents) will not be shy about telling you how crazy you are and how unlikely it is that you and your baby business will be anything more than a complete and abject failure.

And despite it all, you, the founder need to have a supreme confidence, deep in your gut and your chest – even when almost everything (and everyone) seems stacked against you.

Any of this sounds familiar?

Now here’s the one caveat when it comes to being passionate and confident, manic and closed minded about your new business – Be Confident, Not Stupid.

Huh?

Let me explain what I mean…

Be confident, know that some way or another, you and the people that decide to come on this startup journey with you will overcome the challenges and obstacles until you create something of which you can all be proud.

Did you notice the most important element of that sentence?

“…you will overcome the challenges and obstacles…”

Being the founder of a startup is NOT ignoring the weaknesses in your own business, it is not being blinkered and unaware of the challenges and the obstacles – I’ll write that again – being a founder is not being blinkered and ignoring the obvious issues, if anything, it’s being SO self aware that you know exactly what the business suffers from…even more so than all those nay Sayers on the outside who are telling you, you’re going to fail. You know even better than those doomsters, just how close you are to failure and what you need to focus on to be able to overcome these challenges and obstacles.

So, as a founder, be passionate, be focused, even be a little blinkered – just as long as you are self aware and know exactly what you need to do to take a potential catastrophe and convert it into a real business. Like I said in the beginning –

Be Confident…Not Stupid!

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