What Insects Can Teach You About Entrepreneurship
Written by: Laura J. Wellington, Executive Contributor
Executive Contributors at Brainz Magazine are handpicked and invited to contribute because of their knowledge and valuable insight within their area of expertise.
I recently accepted a challenge. It was posed to me by my truck or might I say, the dent and scratched paint it offered. I decided to fix both, myself. How hard could it be with the right materials, right? I’d soon find out.
Removing the dent took about an hour. No, it wasn’t perfect but it was good enough. The trouble came, however, when I applied the paint and then the gloss. Ever so carefully, I managed to masterfully blend the color so as you could barely see where the old paint ended and the new paint began. Half-n-hour later, when the paint had dried (enough) I sprayed the gloss over it. Again, I was pleased.
Standing back and looking at my finished product, I could feel a smile cross my lips. Then, just as I was nearly finished admiring my own work, a huge flying insect flew straight into the area in which I had just fixed. He stuck to the gloss, heaved his last sigh, and died… along with my visions of auto repair perfection. I nearly choked.
Running for a tweezer to see if I might be able to peel him off of my truck with as little an imprint left behind as possible, I returned only to realize that the fragility of the little bugger caused him to break into pieces in the attempt. Needless to say, what began as a relatively small job, turned into a $1800 mess coupled with hours off of my life, a mouthful of swear words, a very late dinner, and my own profound wisdom biting me in the tuckus as reiterated by my twelve-year-old son, “Mom, at least you tried. It looked really great till the bug flew in it.”
And he was right because according to me, “You will never know who you can be unless you try.” This moment was no exception as ridiculous as it seemed. The reminder was well served and frankly took the sting out of that insect’s intrusion into my life and the hijacking of my masterpiece.
Obviously, my son had heard me every time that I had urged him to “reach” beyond his comfort zone. He had observed me in “reaching” myself. And as the lesson hadn’t been lost on him, he wasn’t about to allow it to be lost on me, because “there is always an opportunity in the outcome…good or bad” (another piece of wisdom I’ve shared with him over the years).
In this case, the opportunity to peer into the mind of my son and see the impact that I was having trivialized the assault on my workmanship. So what if I couldn’t perform auto body repair close to the visions in my head. I was molding the mind of a more important body, my son…and that…I was getting right.
I rode high on that satisfaction for the rest of the evening, as what I had expected to learn from my efforts – although completely different – was inarguably better. As both a mother and an entrepreneur, you need to be fluid to keep yourself moving in the right direction. And, it seemed, the only being unable to do so at the moment was the lifeless body still stuck to my vehicle, just hours away from a good scraping. My lesson was his sacrifice… lest we not forget the collective effort we come by most wisdom and, to that same end, most success.
Laura J. Wellington, Executive Contributor Brainz Magazine
Laura J. Wellington is the Founder of Celebrity-Lifestyle blog THREAD MB. A Media-Tech Entrepreneur, Wellington is also an Award-Winning Children's Entertainment creator and Author. Critics have called her most recent book "Be Careful What You Wish For" a 'magnum opus'. A TEDx Speaker, Wellington's newest venture is called ZNEEX, an app that combines fitness and socializing for users and their dogs in a fun, new way that has partners saying "it's the best idea that they've heard in a very long time" (coming to you May 2022). A mother of five, Wellington was widowed at thirty-five years old. She has won The Forbes Enterprise Award, Multiple Telly Awards, The Buzz Award, and many more.
