What a revelation. After all these years – no – decades; I had thought: maybe I’m stupid. At school, they told me I was lazy, so I compensated by working like a demon. That didn’t help enough, so maybe I really wasn’t all that bright; maybe that’s why I battled to succeed. To confuse me …
AND THERE WAS NO excuse for it. I knew what was happening, but I put my business at risk, and I put my family at risk. It had nothing to do with taking entrepreneurial chances; it was just reckless thoughtlessness. It went against all the sensible advice that I give to my small enterprise clients. …
REMEMBER THE STORY about the ships that arrived in the new world, but the locals could not see them because ships were a phenomenon totally unknown to their minds? Sometimes we just can’t accept unbelievable news. People are known to have denied having been given a cancer diagnosis because their minds couldn’t accept it. Today, many …
One of the first words that toddlers hear is: “NO!” As we grow, so we learn to recognize what our parents want us to do and not do. We learn our place in the family and in society by absorbing our family’s attitudes, values and behaviours, by osmosis. Our grandparents introduce us to our heritage …
It is fashionable these days to glamourise entrepreneurial failure. Indeed, you’re considered a failure if you haven’t failed yet. But any small business owner who has survived the devastation of business collapse and who has dragged themselves out of the financial quagmire, knows full well how dreadful this is. To motivate yourself to get up …
The recent City of Johannesburg Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Summits and Symposium, informed by Tamiko Sher’s Entrepreneurship Research Study: Voices of Entrepreneurs in Johannesburg revealed some surprising insights into what Joburg’s entrepreneurs need. More than three-quarters of the people interviewed for the study were entrepreneurs and the balance, organisations that support small businesses. In addition, over 1,000 …
