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Brick No82: Have you hit a brick wall?
By Matt Weston, Friday 16 July 2004 The biggest step to recovery I don't know how it ever keeps tabs on its members . . . but Alcoholics Anonymous claims to have over 2 million of them (and over 100,000 groups in 150 countries). You know the line: " My name is . . . my name is . . . Slim Shady . . . and I'm an alcoholic. " It works. It really works. As Harvey Mackay puts it: " You can't solve a problem unless you first admit you have one . . . AA has used that principle as a starting point to reclaim thousands and thousands of lives. " Once you admit to your problem, you've taken the first, and biggest step to recovery. And you can apply the exact same philosophy to your small business every time you hit a brick wall . . . Have you hit a brick wall? I get a lot of mail that starts like this: " Dear Matt, I've hit a brick wall . . . " (Yup, yet another play on the word brick. I like it.) Usually the mail starts off desperate. You describe your brick wall: your working day is getting longer and longer, but you're getting less done; you can't make your breakthrough sale; or you don't feel you can motivate your staff anymore. But almost always, by the end of the email, you start to get to the root cause of the problem . . . and even start to offer up your own solution. Just admitting you have a problem is the first step on the road to solving it. For most of us (I include myself here) our gut reaction is to bury our heads in the sand. Most entrepreneurs find it hard to (a) admit we have a problem and (b) cry out for help. My advice couldn't be simpler: the sooner you admit that you've hit a brick wall, the sooner you can get to work on knocking it down. Unstuck Footnote #1: Keith Yamashita and Sandra Spataro recently published "Unstuck". It echoes what I'm saying today: stuck equals brick wall. They say this: " Often people get stuck because the most ambitious and rewarding work brings with it the most challenges . . . the question is, how long can you afford to be stuck and what are you going to do about it? " Buy "Unstuck" or browse the website BB equals AA? Footnote #2: You can draw a straight line between Alcoholics Anonymous and business bricks! AA was started-up by a New York stockbroker and an Ohio surgeon (both hopeless drunks) back in 1935. And BB was started-up by Emyr and myself (both entrepreneurs . . . see About Us) I got this from the AA website: " . . . an alcoholic who no longer drinks has an exceptional faculty for reaching and helping an uncontrolled drinker. " The AA message spreads through autonomous groups around the world, where recovered and uncontrolled drinkers meet up to help each other cope with the condition. And the BB message spreads through reader meet-ups: the chance to network, and start sharing those brick walls with other people in exactly the same boat as you. Remember to sign up: back to top |
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