The Ten Commandments for Business Failure - Don Keough [6]
Those immigrants who did make it discovered that what awaited them was seldom the Promised Land, but a future of brutal dawn-to-dark work. My great grandfather found the only job he could get was lifting stone in a Pittsfield, Massachusetts, quarry, sixteen hours a day, one step above prison work. Nevertheless, this hard labor provided a little food and security and, because he soon married and had children, it’s reasonable to think that Michael might have been tempted to settle down and stay in Pittsfield.
It’s reasonable to think that because when you achieve something, even very little, there is the great temptation to quit taking risks.
It’s human nature. I’ve got something. Why risk it? Who knows what’s on the other side of the mountain? Don’t go there!
I imagine my great grandfather heard such voices in his head and probably from some of the people around him in Pittsfield.
“Stay here. You’ve got a job. Lifting rocks is an honorable occupation. There are thousands out there who have nothing!”
But instead of settling into the known, albeit backbreaking, routine Pittsfield offered, Michael took a risk and migrated across half the continent in an oxen-drawn prairie schooner to a far-off land called Iowa. I’m glad he did.
His son, John, my grandfather, continued to expand the Iowa homestead, risking everything, year after year on crops that were subject to blizzards, dust storms, and grasshoppers. I remember being told that because there were so few trees on the property, grandfather had to drive a team of horses about twenty miles once a week to the Rock River, where he would cut wood, the only source of fuel. One day, he swung the ax and cut off his toe. He simply shoved the toe back on, bound it up with burlap, and finished his work.
The toe, the foot, and my grandfather survived—without antibiotics, I might add.
We in this country have a unique gene pool. Most of us come from a long line of remarkable individuals who boarded the boat when most other people stayed behind. Many didn’t even get a chance to get to shore. And those who did survive the journey across the Atlantic or the Pacific (or the mountains or the prairies or the desert) were then rewarded with season after season of unbelievable hardship on farms or in building railroads or in dangerous and dirty mines and factories unimaginable today. In 1900, American families spent nearly twice as much on funerals as they did on medicine. Somehow they prevailed.
Against a background of overcoming challenges like those our ancestors overcame makes a day, any day, at the office a walk in the park.
Yet as our lives get softer and richer and more comfortable, the temptation to quit taking risks is so great.
It’s one of the major diseases of success. It’s easy to succumb, particularly as you get older. I don’t mean age sixty. This disease can strike at age forty. You say to yourself, “I’ve been out on a limb all my life… worrying, losing sleep. Let somebody else do that now. I’m content with the status quo.”
Some might conclude that the risk taken by the startup entrepreneur who mortgages his house and everything else in order to try a new idea or even pioneer a whole new industry is the most difficult kind of risk to take. Four out of five new businesses fail. Most new products never make it out of the test market, and if they do they have only a one in thirteen chance of success. The National Federation of Independent Business Research Foundation estimates that after just five years only half of new businesses with employees are still operating, and many of those at a loss. It certainly isn’t easy.
But equally difficult, and sometimes more so, is to undertake a risk from a position