Take a hundred guys. (And ladies, you know that I use the word “guys” to mean “everyone”, right?) Tell these folk that you are going to run a marathon --- twenty-six miles and change (385 yards? I forget.)

Blow the whistle and what happens next?

Right. Some folk will go maybe a hundred YARDS. At that point, they’ll see the taillights of their brethren and they’ll say, “To heck with this … I’ll never catch those damned rabbits … where is the nearest bar?”

Same thing will happen at the one-mile mark, the five-mile mark, and the ten-mile mark. People will simply lie down, shaking their heads, thinking, “Now who the heck roped ME into doing THIS in the first place?”

But eventually, one person will be the first to cross the finish line. This person will actually win this particular marathon race.

But why?

Well, I’ve been competing in marathons my whole professional life. (NO, not that kind of marathon … though “there was a time” when I did train and actually strap it up for the “Big Run”. No, I’m talking here about the marathons we call “new business start-ups”.) And in these “Business Marathons”, the winners are never:

• The brightest people, or,
• The “slickest” people, or,
• The best-LOOKING people, or,
• The people with the right “pedigree” … be it family or university, or,
• Even the guys who started at the five mile marker … (also known as “the guys with somebody else’s money - aka ‘venture capital’ - in their pockets”).

No, the winners of “Business Marathons” are really just regular people, except for one thing.

And that one thing is the fact that they refuse to lose.

That’s right. A winner is a winner because he or she will not ACCEPT being a loser!

Pretty simple, eh?

So, anybody can be a winner, right?

Well, that’s correct. But before everyone goes off and opens their own business, I think that there are just a couple of things that they oughta know first. And here are some of them:

• “Refusing to lose” almost always means, “outworking the other guy”. You knew that you’d see this, but what does it really mean?

One simple and common term would be the word, “sacrifice”. The great Creator gave us all only so many hours in a day and days in a year. And unfortunately, some of us don’t even get the full allotment of 365 days per year because either we, or those whom we love, must also deal with a personal illness or the illness of a child, parent, or spouse.

But sacrifice does mean that you will have to choose between what many call “leisure time pursuits” and the pursuit of your entrepreneurial dream. So, be prepared to live without your favorite pro sports teams. And, that dream vacation. And, that sports car that will only suck up bucks that must instead be “routed” directly into your business.

Forget also about such juvenile pursuits as “Fantasy Football” (men), and “going out with the girls” (ladies). For these are among the first things to go.

You can eat, yes. But half the time, you can only eat when you can and where you can. This means ix-nay on the ancy-fay restaurants. And you can forget about any “one-hour lunches!” In fact, you can probably forget about lunch altogether. Never forget the immortal words of Gordon Ghekko (played by Michael Douglas), in the movie “Wall Street”; when Ghekko/Douglas said to his aspiring wanna-be, Charlie Sheen, “lunch … is for wimps”.

No, you work through lunch. Just like you work when others are sleeping.

So, that’s “Sacrifice”. Or at least a very thin overview of sacrifice. You get the picture, I’m sure.

And what else?

• “Refusing to lose” also means, “Courage”. And does this character trait ever come into play each and every day!

I’m sure that we all know the “Dictionary Definition” of the word “courage”, but what does this word really mean in an entrepreneurial sense?

Well, and to me, courage is simply “doing the tough things and doing them now and not later”. And what are these “tough things”? Well, they are generally the things that your competition will always find ways to put off.

In my list of "75 Immutable Laws of Life and Business” (available on the website, www.taeradio.com), one particular “Immutable” says, “Each day, you will wake up knowing that there are three things that you must do that day that are going to be both distasteful and difficult to do. The natural tendency is to put these tasks off, into the future. Instead, you must do them first.”

For it is these three things (or four, or two, or eight!) that will truly “advance the ball” towards the common goal of your enterprise, while the other fifty or so “throw-away things” are merely that --- things that you can do that will just “burn time”, but also things that make no real difference relative to the success of your business.

(This is what I call, “The Illusion of Work”! For example, did you ever go to Disney World and stand in those long lines for Space Mountain or some other “hot” ride? What happens? You feel as if you are moving, don’t you? And you are! But one hour later, you have truly and actually only “moved” about thirty feet towards your ultimate goal!)

Guys with courage take on the tough tasks first. And, it is these tough tasks that really help your business grow. The rest of the tasks? They are tasks that can generally be done by your lowest-paid people. And, they will do little or nothing to help you “advance the ball”.

Always remember, guys with courage act decisively. They act now, and not later, “when conditions are better.”

Yuck!

I know (and unfortunately) just too many people who are in a mode that I call, “waiting to act” mode. In salesmen, I call this, “getting ready to sell”. These guys need everything to “align” before acting. MBA types call it, “Paralysis of Analysis” --- the act of waiting until all of the data are in. I prefer to call it “gutless”. I also call it “stealing from your employer”. Because these people are quite simply afraid to take on some new and difficult challenge that can only help the organization grow.

(As I said to a salesman just the other day, “I’m still waiting to hear a news report about some salesperson whose prospective client SHOT him simply because he or she ‘took a risk’ and asked for a sale over the phone!”)

Right now, think of the three most difficult and yet important presently undone tasks in your professional life. Then, ask yourself how long these tasks have been “sitting”, fallow and useless, on the front shelf of your mind? Then, ask yourself why you really have not acted on them.

I think that you’ll discover that the primary reason why nothing has been done to complete, much rather begin these formidable tasks is due to a lack of good old-fashioned courage.

Hey! I’ve “been there”. So I understand.

But what greater feeling is there than to take on a difficult-to-impossible task and then complete that task successfully? “Doing the difficult” is truly what I see life being all about!