Rohail Rizvi

Fear is probably one of the greatest obstacles in entrepreneurship. However, there is another great obstacle that can hold you back almost just as much. That obstacle is outcome dependency. If everytime you get rejected or a client doesn’t like your ideas and you take it out on yourself, it means that you are still outcome dependent. The only way to succeed is to completely kill your outcome dependency. The way to do this is to go all out. Pitch that VC you’re sure is going to shut you down. Ask that girl out with the most ridiculous line and keep going until you’re almost certain you’re going to get slapped. Screw it…screw what they think. This is YOUR problem and not their’s. You’re just using them as a crutch to get over your HABIT of taking it out on yourself when something doesn’t go your way. The only way to fix this is to become immune to rejection and realize that there are other factors at play and it’s not just YOU. So quit blaming yourself, control the factors that you can, and pitch hard.

Some people, including myself, become extremely disheartened when something doesn’t go their way or if someone doesn’t like their ideas. The reality is that if you keep blaming yourself on things outside of your control and view every failure as inherently caused, then you’ve already lost the game. You will only continue to set yourself back and damage your confidence and faith to keep going forward. Thus, it is extremely important that no matter how many times you fail or what criticisms you get from some big shot exec, continue to move forward until you see your vision through. This is not to say that you should not take contructive criticism and apply it, but rather that you should not take failure and criticism as a reason to stop trying and start blaming yourself. Just keep choppin’ as we here at Rutgers like to say.

Popularity: 1% [?]