On stories of rags to riches, separate the lesson from the allure of fast money.
Key Takeaways
- Successful entrepreneurs talk more about their successes than failures
- Glorification of success means some stories hide the difficult parts of doing business
- Success stories about years of hard work can easily be misinterpreted as overnight success
- It is important to pick lessons and fit them into your personal context
Among the popular stories, you will find on the internet today are of people that have built unimaginable wealth from seemingly nothing. Good stories but well crafted to alienate the success of the entrepreneur from the rugged reality of investments.
God forbid that you should be looking at investment ideas because you may easily throw your money into the wind based on the promise of seemingly guaranteed success.
No One Tells You How Your Favorite Entrepreuer Failed Too
The plain truth is that while these stories are true, there is more to them than can be captured in a 1,500 words article, 30 minutes video, or a single podcast episode.
If you have witnessed the conception of a startup that eventually went and became a big deal then you are aware that things look rosy on the outside but the founders paddle themselves numb to keep everything in place.
At least for most of the first few years before processes become automated and money starts flowing.
It often does not matter if it is a garage, a butchery, a retail shop, a gym, a boutique, a college, or even a production company, creating a system that generates lots of money to make anyone a successful case in their field is not easy.
What Professor Margaret Kamar with her tens of millions income from farming will not broadcast a lot is that she not only had a 1,600-acre farm, to begin with but also that she started horning her farming skills back in 1996 with many failed attempts along the way.
You may also not hear the gruesome learning curve that Michael Njuguna had to undertake before gaining enough skill, trust, and confidence with the banks to enable him to run his Kshs 7 million farming business on a quarter-acre piece of land.
But you will read how much money he makes from dairy cows.
The story of Patrick Macharia will tell you that he grew his business (mainly 256 M-Pesa outlets) to annual revenue of Kshs 40 billion from capital of Kshs 70,000 but it will hardly point out the hundreds of sleepless nights and failures that may have surrounded his journey.
These stories are endless.
Are Entrepreneur Success Stories bad?
Not at all.
At least not in the sense of stirring up motivation.
The fact that these stories are true means something – that ordinary people can start from nothing and become unstoppable moguls.
Running a business can be admittedly a complex affair and therefore having a whole lot of entrepreneurs in different fields and from different backgrounds makes it a good enough push for anyone to pursue anything they might otherwise consider unattainable.
In Kenya particularly, hundreds of young investors have made a shot at agriculture – albeit at a small scale – in recent years due to the numerous success cases floating around from dairy farming, beekeeping, organic farming, etc.
They have instilled confidence in general and removed the notion that farming is not possible if you don’t own a thousand acres of land in the Rift valley.
The same thing is almost happening in technology as more individuals gain confidence to develop apps, solutions, digital businesses, etc from the inspiration of other people that have made it in this field.
Just a few years ago it would have been absurd to say that someone is investing their time and money to be a social media influencer but with the likes of Ronoh Chebet making their first Kshs. 1 million at 19 years from influencer gigs then it is no longer absurd.
This is why stories of the likes of Professor Margaret Kamar, Michael Njuguna, and Patrick Macharia will continue being published, liked, shared, and celebrated because they motivate people. And people like being motivated.
Success Stories Should Just be Motivation
It is an easy trap to get into thinking that each of these cases of entrepreneurial success is an invitation to a world of fast and easy money.
And this is where most of us fail to separate the glorification of success from the reality of investing.
Formidable investments remain the same old camps of blood, sweat, and tears. Anything other than this will be in one way or another become unsustainable. The hard work that goes into making an investment is often ignored and inevitably to a catastrophic end.
The lessons matter.
A good habit when learning about the ‘I built my chicken business from a feather’ stories is to create lessons applicable to your own path.
You get to create the lessons after tying together pieces between the tens of entrepreneurial stories floating around.
One story may have answers on what to do when you lack initial capital, another will tell you how to market your product, another will have lessons on resilience, another has wisdom nuggets on customer relationships and the list goes on.
The lessons are never in one story.
No single entrepreneur will give you their blueprint to success for free.
This may be intentional or just out of sheer lack of a blueprint on their part. So it is on you to separate the lessons from the allure of fast money and apply these in your own investments.
