In a Harvard Business Review blog post, Dan Pallotta offered this scenario:
"Imagine Walt Disney at the age of nineteen. His uncle asks him what he plans to do with his life, and he pulls out a drawing of a mouse and says, 'I think this has a lot of potential.'"
The uncle would have laughed in his face. Later when Walt Disney proposed Disneyland a lot of bankers and others did laugh in his face. Not a great feeling. An awful feeling.
Pallotta's point is that vulnerability is one of seldom-discussed characteristics of entrepreneurs.
Visionaries also tend to be misfits, and you don't have to be in the Walt Disney class for that to be true.
Pallota associates vulnerability with a lack of cynicism.
The cynic says nobody will want that new, untested, maybe inpractical, new product or service or idea. The entrepreneur says "What if they do?"
The cynic says you can't really change things much, certainly not by yourself. The entrepreneur says "Some people have. Why not me?"
I guess entrepreneurs and artists and writers have a lot in common. A certain amount (sometimes a lot) of rejections awaits all of them. And while being vulnerable sounds romantic, vulnerable people get hurt. The trick isn't to avoid it, the trick is to take it, learn from it if possible, lick your wounds...and start again.
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