When I was working as the financial director at Master Currency, the sign on the Boardroom door said, ‘The last hurdle’ and, although this doesn’t constitute a piece of advice per se, it has always stuck with me.
In business you never know what the last hurdle is that you will have to overcome, so you need enormous reserves of tenacity to keep facing the obstacles that are in your way. This is as true for entrepreneurs as it is for people in corporate business.
But while that tenacity is important, I think it’s also important to balance it with knowing when to let go. This is often extremely difficult. After all, how do you know when you should continue to rise to challenges that you encounter and keep chipping away at something, or walk away?
I think the answer lies in the reasons behind your actions. When you keep banging your head against the same door, you need to ask yourself why you’re doing it. You need to ask yourself if your emotions are preventing you from accepting the facts that are staring you in the face.
Sometimes we become emotionally attached to ideas or plans and are unable to let go of them even when it’s clear that they are flawed. This just leads to a wasteful expenditure of energy that might be better channeled to areas of the business or new ideas that hold better promise.
Knowing when to push through a closed door and when to walk away from it to find another that’s more yielding is part of the skill of running a business, and one that can only be mastered through self-assessment and self-awareness.
“Knowing when to push through a closed door and when to walk away is part of the skill of running a business.”