For years and years, the story of Jack in the beanstalk seems nothing more to the average man than a child’s innocent fairy tale.
And then one day, its real meaning stares him in the face like a roaring lion.
It’s not just any man or woman who discovers this. It’s the person who has done something as audacious as starting his own business, and taken unimaginable risks of which he was not even aware when he started.
One day he realizes that now he is Jack, and he has gone to the marketplace, not to sell the family cow, but to give up the comfort of a steady income, of the predictability of working for someone else. In the marketplace, he gives up his cow to a fast-talker who promise him the magic beans of wealth and personal autonomy.
When he gets home, it’s not his mother that’s upset – it’s his wife. She, being the practical one, wants to pay the bills. And he struggles with all kinds of problems, such as clients on the phone, hoping that they don’t hear the gurgling of the family washing machine five feet from his home office.
But these beans really are magic.
The thing is, they work only for those who have two important qualities. One is a real love, a driving zeal, for the particular work at hand. The other is plain old perseverance.
I don’t know if your passion is giving physical therapy lessons, or walking others’ dogs. Mine is writing, and writing to sell. When I tinker with the 95 characters in a Google ad to send your mind above your everyday humdrum, when I craft a landing page with just the right dose of persuasion and push, I get a charge out of that.
In college I typed my papers long into the night, fighting to stay awake, revising them endless times to get them just right. (And this was before the ease of personal computers.)
When I check my ad results in the morning, it’s like a fisherman poking at his nets. When I see clicks, and some of those clicks become signups, I get an electric feel.
I stare at the data on Google’s labyrinthine results page. There’s a connection there between my mind and the prospect’s that goes far beyond the pixels of my computer screen. I look at keywords clicked on, probing into this invisible person’s psyche. I’m thinking either, “What made him buy,” or “What made him NOT buy?”
This is what drives me on. It’s the same for anyone who bears the burdens of running a business. It’s what keeps us fighting the threat of the giant’s bellowing, “Fee fi fo fum….”
And it’s what makes us steal the bag of gold when he is sleeping.
