COMING OUT STRONGER

James Meadows • September 22, 2016

Entrepreneurs face more difficulties than most people can imagine. Many of these difficulties are encountered before the new business is launched. It is how the entrepreneur responds to those difficulties that will determine ultimate success or failure.

Inc. just published its annual listing of America’s 500 fastest-growing private companies. In reflecting on the difficulties that every entrepreneur experiences, Leigh Buchanan quotes Stanford professor of entrepreneurship, Steve Blank, who reminds us that entrepreneurs can come out of those difficulties stronger than they entered them (“Inc. 500” September 2016, pp. 20–34):

“ Doing a startup is an act of violence and chaos. . . . Near-death experiences—your co-founder quit; your best customer walked away; you lost your funding—that’s what happens before launch. You go through a series of trials, and from each one of them you come out stronger. ” (p. 27)

We’ve all heard the saying about what doesn’t kill me makes me stronger (Friedrich Nietzsche). We have a lot of strong entrepreneurs out there today!

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We explore the overuse or inappropriate use of the words "honest," "honesty," and "honestly." Much of the overuse or inappropriate use of these words is in contexts that intrinsically message the audience that the speaker is not trustworthy. I call the overuse or inappropriate use of these words in this context HONESTY VALIDATORS because the speaker believes they validate the truth being spoken. We need a solution to this problem. My solution is to replace these honesty validators with CLARITY VALIDATORS. Instead of trying to be honest, try to be clear. Replacing "honest," "honesty," and "honestly," with "clear," "clarity," and "clearly," produces significantly more benefit to the speaker and to the audience.