Nobody Starts At The Top

Success can seem like a faraway dream. We sometimes imagine that it pops out of thin air for people, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Have you ever seen an interview where the interviewee laughs at being called an overnight success? To the public they are in fact an overnight success because we didn’t know their name last week or last month. But what we haven’t witnessed are all of the years of hard work that this once “unknown” put in to get to where they are. We’re only seeing the end result.

• In 2005 the CEO of Etsy, Robert Kalin, wanted a place to sell his handmade furniture. His site had a slow start with no help from the economy. Today, nine years later, Etsy is worth some $700 million.
• eBay’s net worth is about $60 billion and growing every year. eBay ( which derived from Echo Bay) began as a sole proprietorship in 1995.
• Amazon was a three person start up in 1994. The team made its first sale, a book, out of Jeff Bezo’s garage. Today there are over 100,000 employees and net sales were a little over $25 billion at the end of 2013.
• Microsoft also got its start in a garage. Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded their startup company in 1975 and today it’s worth just under $70 billion.

We don’t all start at the top. Each of these founders put in years of hard work to create businesses that are now household names.

With enough intension and determination we can get where we want to go. The above founders started with an idea they wanted to see come to fruition. Did they dream of making billions? Probably not- but dream they did.

Big time.

Those successes and pie in the sky ideas seem unreachable to many of us, but you too can be a success. The day you were born you knew how to do next to nothing, but you learned to hold a bottle. You learned to smile. You learned to roll over, then crawl, then pull up, walk and eventually run. Each new task requires more muscle than the task before it. One builds upon another and another. Business is not so very different. We learn new task after new task until eventually… success!!

Success is reachable. Just ask Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. It just takes a dream and huge determination.