Resiliency

Venture Hacks has a couple of pointers to very interesting and complementary articles.  Their post links to one by Michael Wolff, talking about the events in the life of a particular entrepreneur:

“Windows knocked him off the main stage for 10 years; then the Internet seemed to sideline him; not to mention that serious business people (along with many others) thought he was nutty; then he had problems with the SEC (and not insignificant ones); then he nearly died.”

No hyperbole, either.  Getting up and coming back after all that to become possibly the most influential tech CEO on the planet, someone described as “the last mogul”?  That is resiliency — which is the subject of the second article, from Mark Suster at Both Sides of the Table.

Without a doubt entrepreneurs need resiliency, for the exact reasons that Suster brings out in his article (every entrepreneur I know has stories like his).  But this isn’t just for entrepreneurs, it’s something everyone needs.

None of us get through life without our share of setbacks.  As Suster quotes Winston Churchill, “Success is the ability to go from one failure to another with no loss of enthusiasm.”

All of us need to get up and dust ourselves off now and again.  The kinds of things Steve Jobs has been through puts the things I’ve had to endure in perspective. I guess if he can keep coming back, so can I — and so can you.

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