I believe that whatever goal you have, whatever challenge is in front of you, the easiest and the fastest way to go and accomplish it is to model success: find someone who's already doing what you want to do, learn what made them successful and apply it to your business.
In today’s
article, we're going to learn from Carl Benz whose company eventually became Mercedes-Benz
and his lesson is “follow your dreams”. When Carl Benz was 2 years old, his father
who was a locomotive driver, was killed. He grew up in absolute poverty but his
mother made sure that it continued to get his education and further his studies.
Initially,
he went into locksmithing; that was the box that he was put into but he wanted
to follow his dreams, follow in his father's footsteps and go into locomotive
engineering. He also had a passion for riding his bicycle and dreamed of a day
where there'd be a horseless carriage where people could be able to get around
on a vehicle that didn't require a horse. After he finished his studies he
spent seven years bouncing around trying to find himself. He took jobs in
mechanical engineering as a draftsman, as an iron worker in the construction
company, as a designer but he couldn't find a position that he really loved.
And instead of doing the safe thing and sticking with one job for the rest of
his life, he decided the best thing for him would be continue to explore until
he found something he loved.
So at age
26 after spending the past seven years failing and bouncing from job to job to
job, he decided to launch his own company with a partner. Unfortunately, his
partner wasn't really reputable and after a year, all of the company's assets
and tools and equipment were impounded, so he set up another company with a
photographer and a cheese merchant merging the businesses together so they can
get money from the bank but he got his shares diluted to owning just 5% of the
company and had a really lowly role in the business. The worst part was the
other founders didn't consider his ideas when they were designing new products.
After a year he left, now he has seven years of failing in the job market and
two failed startup businesses under his belt. What would you do if you were in
this situation? Most people will be filled with despair, they’d feel like: “I've
tried everything, I've tried every job, I've tried every business and it's not working
out what am I supposed to do?” He then tapped back into his love of bicycles and
his dream of building the horseless carriage. He visited a local bicycle shop, got
to know the two partners who founded it and with them started a new business. His
goal was to build the first horseless carriage which would become known as the “automobile”.
After
working away for two years, he finally had his first prototype and was so
excited about the first automobile. Carl set up a live public demonstration to
show everybody what his new invention could do in but unfortunately, the automobile
was too difficult to control and in front of everybody, smashed into a wall. So
here he is after two years of research into developing and making this prototype,
after two years before four failed businesses, after seven years before failed
jobs, everything's leading up to this moment, this day, here it is, it finally
arrived and it's a huge public failure for him.
What would
you do then? Would you give up and go do the same thing again and get a job?
It was
Karl's dream so he had to keep going, it took him another two years of developing
and tinkering and modifying before he had a product that was ready for another
big public demonstration.
In 1887
he had his new prototype ready for demonstration at the Paris Expo and it was a
success. In the summer of 1888, he started taking orders and he had now the first
commercially available automobile in history. His dream of building a horseless
carriage had been realized and he was on his way to building a worldwide brand
name.
This is a
really important lesson for you guys, because if you have a dream there's going
to be people who will tell you not to do it, you're going to try a lot of
things and you're going to fail. It might take years of failing and failing and
failing, with no light anywhere at the end of the tunnel, you're going to want
to quit and throw in the towel multiple times, the only thing that keeps you
excited is that dream.
It's at
times in the rational belief that you can make this dream a reality and if you
listen to your dream and continue to take steps every day to move towards it
eventually you'll accomplish it, and maybe build a worldwide recognizable brand
in the process too .