One of our main competitors beat us in 2019 in terms of dollar volume and number of hotels sold. They are also younger and better looking than we are. Ha

What do you do? Pout, cry, lay down in the floor or do you brush yourself off and get after it again. I choose door number four. There has never been an athlete or sports team that doesn’t know what it is like to lose. The key is what you do after it.

Fred Smith, ever heard of him? Probably not. He founded FedEx and when he was in college, he wrote a term paper on the idea of Federal Express and his professor told him the idea was not feasible and would fail. Walt Disney was once fired as a cartoonist because his boss said he lacked imagination. Steve Jobs was fired from his own company (Apple) in 1985 and founded a new firm called NeXT that ultimately merged with Apple and he became the chairman, again. Jeff Bezos once started a phone company called Amazon Fire and after it failed to take off, they cut the price of the phone to 99 cents and still failed.

Elon Musk was at the point of Bankruptcy when he started Tesla and they couldn’t sell the cars. After many failures, Colonel Sanders licensed the first restaurant to use his recipe when he was 62 years old. Abraham Lincoln failed in business twice and lost eight elections before becoming the President of the United States. Last one, Winston Churchill. The Germans ran nightly (yes, every night) bombing raids over London from September 1940 until May 1941. Talk about losing over and over and over! His “never Give Up” a speech will be remembered as one of the greatest of all time.

These type stories could go on for pages, but the central point is that in every story, there was a period of failure that helped define the person and their future. What if the names listed above just quit because they had failed? Just using Abraham Lincoln as the example, if he had not kept going after failure, the Unites States would probably look very different today.

Momentum is funny thing. You can’t plan for it or predict it. It just sneaks up on you and if you don’t make the most of it, you will lose it. Personally, life and business are similar in that there are ups and downs, mistakes, set backs and many opportunities to give up and quit. The key is to keep moving forward and never give up. KT