The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

May 11True Potential

Along the path of a useful life / Will heart's-ease ever bloom; / The busy mind has no time to think / Of sorrow, or care, or gloom; / And anxious thoughts may be swept away / As we busily wield a broom. // I am glad a task to me is given / To labor at day by day; / For it brings me health, and strength, and hope, / And I cheerfully learn to say,– / “Head, you may think; heart, you may feel; / But hand, you shall work always!”

Louisa May Alcott—Her Life, Letters, and Journals (1889)

To make something unnoticeable takes great skill. That may seem like an odd thing for an entrepreneur to consider given that we've spent so much time in this book talking about the grandness of your ideas.

But grandness is not simply show. Grandness is your commitment to your idea. More often than not, you will shape real success into something flat, plain, useful for sure, and unassuming, but yours uniquely.

Alcott's character extolled the virtues of being trained to do work with her hands, and this is advice every entrepreneur should consider, no matter the nature of the business. To craft something from hand is to perhaps unlock its true purpose.

Noted architect and wood craftsman George Nakashima spoke of the wood he worked with in this manner in The Soul of a Tree:

Each flitch, each board, each plank can have only one ideal use. The woodworker, applying a thousand skills, must find that ideal use and then shape the wood to realize its true potential.

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