Many people get into business because they want to make money.  That’s not a particularly bad reason, but once you’ve actually started to make some money from your business—if it is an entrepreneurial business and not just some run of the mill kind of thing—you will quickly realise that being in business has very little to do with money.

It’s a game, a competition, a test… all of the above. Money is just a way of keeping score.  The whole point of an entrepreneurial business is to create something special.  It is your unique business idea that makes it a tangible moneymaking proposition, and your passion that makes it work.

If you lack either of these features, a unique idea or passion, then you won’t really have a business. And the chances of success without these traits are even slimmer than the already slim chance that any business has to start with.

When a business fails, a lot of people just simply give up and go back to washing dishes or whatever it was they were doing before.  But like I said, business is a game.  Like any game, you get more than one “life”.  You can make multiple attempts if you have the persistence to see it through.

One man who could tell you a lot about this is former “entrepreneurial ambassador”, Reuben Singh.                                                                                                                                              He has reached the highest of heights and the deepest of depths in his career, and when he was down, there was no shortage of people lining up to give him a boot in the ribs.  The media were especially ghoulish at that time.

One judge even took it upon himself to make totally unfounded and unfair remarks about Singh’s character based on nothing more than hearsay.  Unfortunately the judiciary has an unfair and unrealistic level of protection to be able to say the most slanderous things with impunity.  Someone more sensitive to criticism may well have been defeated by such an obvious attempt at public humiliation (otherwise known by its more common name of bullying), and that’s why I believe these sorts of remarks should not be tolerated and protected simply because it is a judge who is saying them.

Singh, of course, did simply let it all slide off his back.  It’s part of philosophy of “Be true to yourself”, which means always acting with integrity and thus having complete confidence in your own actions.  As long as you proceed from a point of acting faithfully in accordance with pure intentions, criticism is much less likely to affect you on a personal level.

“Success is the best revenge,” he says.  Certainly if this is true, he has exacted a very great revenge indeed, because since then his primary business interests of Isher Capital and alldayPA have gone on to become major success stories.

The lesson here is that you can stumble and make mistakes at any point in your business career, and there is no shame in this.  Many of the very biggest names in the world of business have occasionally made wrong decisions, some of them even being brought to the point of bankruptcy.  What matters in every situation is how you respond to adversity.  If you believe in yourself and you believe in your vision, you have no reason to think of failure as anything more than a temporary setback.