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The bottom line is that to be successful as an entrepreneur today in business and in life you’ll need to cultivate a sense of balance in your life.  Choose to do work you love, delegate the rest.  Find time each day to sit quietly with yourself and enjoy the tranquility of not having to think about anything but yourself, as difficult as that might be for you to face.  Be decisive by trusting your own intuition while balancing the advise you seek from professionals who can hold you accountable.

Most of all, let go of the notion that you have to be perfect.

Richard Dennis, a super successful futures trader once said, It’s amazing how rich you can get without being perfect.” I’ve often contemplated the dilemma of producing perfect work, work that meets the expectations of the client and the cruel alternative, less than perfect work.  It can be counter-productive when you’re continually expecting perfection.

In a blog post, Internet marketing System Seminar founder, Ken McCarthy, in a muse on perfection noted “the perfectionist will resist and reject what IS – simply because it can never measure up to his imagined goal of what SHOULD BE.”

I once made a sales presentation to a potential client.  In my zeal to impress them with my marketing genius, I gave (stress the word gave) them five concrete suggestions on how to expand their sales lagging business.  Among them: survey 100 of your best customers and find out why they haven’t been doing business with you lately.  Call 10 of your best customers and ask them what type of new merchandising they’d like to see to make them patronize you once again.  Spend more money on getting current customers to buy more often instead of trying to get new customers.  All of these suggestions, each with a potential to generate tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars, was met with disdain.  “I don’t like to be called at home so I’m sure my best customers won’t like it either.”  I’d rather see my name in the newspaper ad which costs me a fortune each week, than spend a tenth of the money to encourage regular customers to shop more often.”

Many entrepreneurs obsess over little things that might require effort because it is too hard to make it or do it perfectly.  So they rationalize and convince themselves that it wouldn’t work in the first place, especially when I have to pay this consultant $500 to tell me something I already know but don’t want to do. Even if it could generate tens of thousands more dollars.

Successful entrepreneurs learn to face their fear and channel it into action, even if it’s not perfect, because as General Patton said, “A good plan, violently executed now is better than a perfect plan next week.” And Adminiral Gorshkov, father of the modern Russian Navy, “Better is the enemy of good enough.”

When we think of fear we imagine petty annoyances when we were younger.  Like the fear of spiders or dark places or heights.  Being in a tall building on top of the observation deck and looking straight down at the tiny cars and specks of human below.  That’s scary.

Because we imagine what it would be like if we were falling down, pulled by the enormous force of gravity, toward the concrete slab we call earth.  Plop. Dead.

Its easy to tell this story because it never happened, at least not to me.  But we’ve all seen scenes in the movies where the villain is held out a window, by his two feet, dangling, screaming for his life to be spared, knowing full well if the other persona let’s go, he’ll be toast, or at most a pancake.

Revealing our true selves is a lot more difficult.  Our egos are so fragile.  We wrongly base our self worth at times on what other people think of us.  Or worse, what we assume they think of us, as if we were professional mind readers.

Mind reading is one of my favorite ways to put myself in a rotten mood. I make assumptions of what other people think about me.  Once I was at a party where most of the people there were not my closest friends, just acquaintances.  I would stand in the corner and watch two people talking to each other.  I have no idea what they were talking about but I would assume they were talking about ME, of all people!

It’s arrogant I guess to think you’re the center of the universe, the life of the party and total strangers are talking and all you can think of is yourself.  It’s selfishness.

As it says in the book, The Four Agreements, “all sadness is rooted in making assumptions.” This is why we have so much fear around revealing ourselves.  If you don’t feel good about yourself, why would you want to share it with others?  Most of us, or some of us, live a dual life.  I’m not saying its healthy, just a reality for some.  We put on a mask of self confidence and smugness publicly.  Inside our souls we are struggling with self worth issues.  So it’s like revealing the hidden private side, we work so hard to keep under wraps that causes us fear.

The fear of revelation is the fear of our hidden self.  Isn’t this why public speaking is the #1 fear?