Last night I woke up at 3 am with an epiphany. An inspiring, energizing, lightning bolt of inspiration. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to capture the spirit of Why Try, so I could offer a concise and compelling response to people when they ask why I’m doing the podcast. Honestly, anything would be better than fumbling around, stammering, “It’s uh, about entrepreneurs, business owners, and their experiences, so we can learn, uh, about what they’ve learned…in business.” Talk about uncompelling!
The more honest answer is longer, and a little more complicated. Fundamentally, entrepreneurship is something that I’m really curious about. I want to learn how businesses are made, what their founders did to gain traction, how they grew their company over time, and the different challenges they dealt with. These are lessons there that any aspiring entrepreneur can apply to their own journey (once they’ve started).
But more than that, I want to learn from these business-creators at a uniquely personal level. Whenever I hear stories about business tycoons, I always want to know how their professional journey fits into the bigger picture of their life. If their journey meant sacrificing all of their personal relationships, and abandoning all hobbies and sense of balance, their story probably isn’t very applicable (or compelling) to me. But if their story is, “I was nervous, my wife was nervous. We had two young kids, but this was really important to me. I gave myself 18 months to get it going before I’d have to find another job so that we could keep our house.” That’s worth listening to, because it’s relatable, and it’s honest. Instantly, it gets me thinking about all the other priorities in my life, and what I would do in their situation.
My goal for this podcast is to inspire people by exposing them to the attitudes that it takes to succeed, and by making entrepreneurship relatable to the rest of us. It’s a small and unique group of people that decide to go their own way in life, but you can always find something that connects with you. Conversely, these businesspeople share certain perspectives that have allowed them to transcend many obstacles, so we can usually find some personal insight that we can apply to our own lives. Failure, for instance, is something that gets talked about a lot by people who are nervous about starting their own journey. Anyone who’s been on that journey, however, will tell you that some amount of failure is inevitable. But when you keep going, those failures become learning experiences, rather than permanent setbacks. Failure really has more to do with attitude than anything. Even if a person fails in all their businesses and goes broke, they can still choose to look at it as an incredible experience, and an education that they can use for the rest of their lives.
I personally was inspired by my friend Esam Goodarzy, who told me, “You will do it. But you’ll just do it two years from now and wish you’d started today.” That push gave me what I needed to start. I had been 90% of the way there. Interested, but apprehensive. I knew I wanted to be my own boss, to start sharing my thoughts with others, and help people change their lives for the better. When I began, in that moment, I had no idea where or how to start, but because I was inspired, I started figuring it out one step at a time. I have learned and grown tremendously since beginning, and I can trace it all to that initial inspiration.
So that’s ultimately what I’m doing. I’m aiming to inspire listeners by sharing stories of people who have taken the leap.
There’s a place for the “how-to’s” and “business hacks” of the world, and their creators do offer a lot of value for the rest of us. But what I’m more interested in is touching people’s lives through inspiration, as well as guiding them to a more empowered state of mind.
The podcast won’t change dramatically as a result of this insight. But what I will do is start developing resources to help people get inspired, to master their own psychology, and start achieving more than they would have ever dreamed possible.