Today I met a broken man who hadn’t forgotten how to be kind to a stranger.I was visiting the run down city of Bradford in West Yorkshire and, halfway through my stay, I called in to the local shopping centre for a coffee. The place was bustling and I took my latte to a small table whilst observing the comings and goings of daily life as though it were a Lowry painting on the move. As I settled down I caught the eye of an Asian man to my right. A stout chap of about 35. He nodded, smiled and I did the same. That in itself is a rarity in modern life so I sought to open up dialogue. Making small talk he eventually asked me what I was reading. I told him it was Seth Godin’s Purple Cow and, after hearing about the entrepreneur’s approach to product marketing, he confided that he had run a health food business but that it had gone bust in the recession.
In America that probably wouldn’t have been so unusual because they say every truly successful businessman in the States has had several failures. So, it was with some sadness that I heard his story unfold. He had done everything in his power to save his business from going under……advice from local business sources and even an attempt to get extra funding from the bank, however, his business had eventually closed.
What did he do now? I quizzed. “Now I sit at home and my family won’t hear of me starting a new business,” he said. “They have said that they will feed me but that in return I must stay at home and do nothing. They figure that that is the lesser of two evils because whilst I am not ‘trying’ again, I cannot possibly fail”. How terribly sad.
There is no better way to drain someone’s self confidence than by confirming they are a failure when they are already thinking the same. Thank God for my wonderful mother who instilled in me ‘that there’s no such word as can’t’. And it was Henry Ford who attested ‘Whether you can or you can’t you’re right’.
Never compound failure with more failure. Find a way of helping someone to lift their spirit. Tell them that it is not a failure so much as a learning experience. I remember losing £7,000 in a business deal. Someone took great delight in reiterating how much I was out of pocket until I told them that I had just paid £7,000 for a 10 second lesson. There was no college in the world that could have taught me what I learnt in that business deal. Out of failure emerges success…..providing you always help someone see that there’s light at the end of the tunnel however dark their life might appear. Learn to be an optimist, it’s all you’ve got in business when the brown stuff hits the fan! And one more thing. After thanking me for my kind words of support the man rose, shook my hand and gave me half of his sandwich. “My gift to you my friend,” he said and departed. A giant amongst men
