Cockiness, Confidence, and Stubbornness

Ask any entrepreneur and I bet you they will mention that they had to be stubborn to a certain degree to get started. To paraphrase almost any rapper, “there are a lot haters in the world.” With all the hate and doubt that your friends acquaintances, and even family might express, it might become tough to stand your ground - let alone face the challenges that go along with starting a business.

Therefore I venture to say that in addition to being stubborn, you have to have a lot of confidence and dare I, cockiness.

Starting a business is kind of like saying you can do or make something better than anyone else can. That in itself is a mix of confidence and cockiness. Maybe some naivety is mixed in there as well, but that’s not included in my blog post title so I won’t go there now.

Starting up a business is making something out of nothing and it takes a lot of confidence to take that leap of faith. Not only do you have to believe in what you’re doing wholeheartedly, but then be able to convince others to become your clients, customers, and maybe coworkers. Cockiness in this instance, is having 110% faith in what you’re doing even though 99.999% (not actual statistic - but something close to it) of businesses fail. This in itself is foolish and why I call it cocky. You are flying in the face of logic and going for it.

So if you’re “going for it” then be stubborn, have confidence, and even have a little cockiness, because you’ll probably need all of it to succeed.