For those of you who are looking to be entrepreneurs or to grow your entrepreneurial business into something bigger and better that makes a greater impact, this is an important consideration. Every minute counts.
Here´s my rule of thumb, no pun intended: If you can count the amount of time you put into a project on your fingers, then you haven´t spent enough time on it. You will have to work on a project until you think you can´t do it any longer. You will have to take a lot of criticism and negativism and hear “no” repeatedly. It will get worse before it gets better.
But if you remember the meaning of the thumb in Midus Touch, it stands for emotional maturity and strength of character, you´ll reach your goal. It´s a well-known fact that I experienced a financial turnaround of enormous proportions in the early 1990s. I never went bankrupt although a lot of people though I did, but I owed billions of dollars. It was not a great situation to find myself in. It would be easy to see this as bad luck, but I didn´t see it that way.
I knew the economy and real estate ran in cycles, but what happened in New York was devastating to many people. Real estate took a huge nose dive and the city hit some hard times, and those hard times included me. A lot of people were wiped out. My biggest mistake was that I lost my focus and was playing too much. I´d go to the fashion shows in Paris and didn´t have a firm hold on my businesses. I just thought everything would keep rolling along with the money flowing in. My father once said that everything I touched turned to gold and I started to believe that. Things were easy and lucrative. It seemed that I didn´t have to pay attention, so I didn´t. I got a good wake-up call when things turned from onward and upward to onward and downward.
Fortunately, over time, I was able to regain my focus and my fortune. I actually became much more successful after my big loss. One of the reasons is that I had always seen myself as a lucky guy, and I still do. I didn´t let the experience of a big loss change my view of who I am. I saw the whole thing as a “blip” and nothing more. I knew I had the skill set to get back into the game, just as a golfer knows and uses the same technique to get out of the sand trap and sink a birdie.
Do I still make mistakes? Yes, of course. But just as I did during my financial meltdown, I realize that I have no one to blame but myself. I take full responsibility because I am responsible for any situation I get into. As Robert points out, that´s one gateway to the Midus Touch. Everyone makes mistakes, but it´s what you do with them and what you learn from them that matters. And that´s all part of emotional maturity and strength of character.
One of the greatest attributes you can have is an intense sense of responsibility. It is empowering, for one thing, and your effectiveness will increase tremendously when you own the good and the bad of all you do. In business and in life, this is an area you can work on. As soon as you take responsibility for all that you touch, the power is in your hands to make it extraordinary. For me, having that sense of control has been a catalyst for success.