As the founder and CEO of Garnysh, a Silicon Valley-based fitness and technology company, I know a thing or two about surviving in business. And as a woman entrepreneur, I’m even more knowledgeable about the challenges female entrepreneurs face in that cutthroat world.
Here are what I consider to be three rules for business success that are easy to remember and can make a big difference in how you approach running your business.
1. Rejection—the only guarantee
No one likes rejection. It feels terrible and it makes you doubt yourself. As an entrepreneur, I find that I’m walking through a minefield of rejection. Loans rejected, partnerships rejected, business plans rejected, and so on. But the next time you find you’re feeling dejected about being rejected, remember one thing: getting rejected is actually an important part of your job. I have found that when I accept that I will be rejected, I can recover much faster, and even use that rejection to my advantage.
I’m beginning to realize more and more there is nothing personal about rejection. Use it as a learning experience. Imagine if everything you did was accepted by everyone—every business idea you had was praised, every leadership decision applauded. Sure, it would feel damn good at first, but you’d also never learn a thing. How do you get better and better every day? By being rejected, getting back up, and trying again.
Learning through heartbreak
You can’t deny your feelings. That doesn’t make you a worse entrepreneur or businesswoman—it makes you a better one. We’re very introspective creatures, after all. The hurt you feel from getting rejected often leads you to examine yourself, examine your work, and take it to the whole next level.
I’ve made amazing advances in my career, thanks to screw-ups, mistakes, and rejection. In fact, I don’t think I’d be where I am today without all of that. When you really open yourself to feedback—which is all that rejection is—you can tailor-make your business to better serve your customers, and you can tailor-make yourself to better serve your business (and your family, too).
Let bad feedback guide you
What if Steve Jobs had given up on Apple because he got some negative feedback in the beginning or ran into some pitfalls? What if Oprah had stopped being an anchorwoman because she was rejected for being African American or not having the stereotypical anchorwoman body type? All that they’ve added to the world would never have been. That’s why if you really believe in what you’re doing, you must persist.
Another great way to look at feedback and rejection is to see it as a compass. Is your product not selling? Maybe it’s directed to the wrong customer base. Do you keep failing to get that one dream job and keep getting rejected? Maybe you need to rethink your approach, or, even more important, maybe the universe is telling you that that job does not use your strongest, most unique skills. Changing directions can hurt, but sometimes you weren’t going in the right direction to begin with.
2. Being cautious vs. being rash
Some people are all-or-nothing. Sometimes I want to dip my toe into something and see what happens, and other times I want to dive in headfirst. So which one is better? Even though I’ve stated in other articles that I don’t entirely believe in the importance of achieving balance—it’s a made-up idea—I think that the key here is awareness. Know when to go slow and know when to speed up. I’ll explain this shortly.
Being too cautious
As an entrepreneur, I cannot always be cautious. Often I have to take a leap, even when I’m afraid and don’t know what is waiting for me on the other side. This is so important for business; there have been no successful enterprises that were built on caution. Sure, maybe there was caution in the beginning, but the caution could never be sustained. It needs to be mixed with some boldness.