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by
Daymond John
When you’ve got nothing to lose, you’ve got everything to gain. Sometimes it takes having your back against the wall, leveraging your last dollar, and having no place to go but up, up, up if you expect something to happen. Because if you’ve got to succeed to survive, you will. Trust me on this.
There’s a great line I heard from Liz Claman, an anchor on the Fox Business Network. She told me once that her father used to say, “I’ve given you every advantage in life except for being disadvantaged.”
POWER FACT: In the United States, immigrants are twice as likely to start a business as US citizens….There’s a reason for this: When you’re new to American shores, you’re hungry to succeed….If you’ve been here your whole life, there’s less on the line. It doesn’t mean you’re not hungry, but it’s a whole different appetite. When you’re trying to make your way in a new place, it has more to do with survival and less to do with getting by.
Homework these days means analytics. It means looking at others who’ve succeeded in the same field. But go ahead and also look at all the businesses that failed to connect with your market, and see what you can learn from their missteps. These people failed so you don’t have to. Why fail on your own dime and on your own time if you don’t have to?
And as long as we’re talking about financing your business, let’s borrow a page from my friend and fellow Shark Mark Cuban, who tells young entrepreneurs to pay down their debt with their first available dollars. “If you’ve got twenty-five thousand dollars, fifty thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars,” he says, “you’re better off paying off any debt you have because that’s a guaranteed return.”
According to a Harvard Business School study, 83 percent of the population does not take the time to set professional goals; 14 percent have goals in mind, but they don’t write them down; 3 percent set down their goals on paper and commit to them….
