Do Not Worry Take Action

In his book, “Blue Highways,” William “Least Heat Moon” Trogdon reported that his Osage Indian grandfather, William “Heat” Moon, taught him this about worrying: “Some things don’t have to be remembered; they remember themselves.”

One of the things we small business owners do really well is worry about our small businesses. Actually, a little bit of worrying isn’t bad, if it’s part of recognizing a real threat and causes us to take action.

But sometimes we waste emotional energy worrying about things over which we have little or no control. Or we worry about something that isn’t likely to happen, and even if it actually did, it would remember itself, when the time comes.

Recently, I watched the movie “Bowfinger,” with Eddie Murphy playing Kit Ramsey, a famous star of action-movies, Ramsey was also famous for being a pathological worrier. He worried about really strange things that would never happen, and it caused him to lead a frightened and miserable life.

Ramsey’s greatest worry was being captured, killed and eaten by space aliens. He also worried about being crushed by a gigantic foot. Oh, and he worried that his body might burst into flames. Pretty silly, huh?

Watching Murphy play this unstable character was hilarious. But I’m afraid it also made me think about how silly we are when we worry about things in our small businesses that, like Ramsey’s obsessions, probably will never happen.

Instead of space aliens, how much time do we spend stressing out about our businesses being killed and eaten by the dreaded foreign competition. China seems to be our space alien du jour.

Instead of being stepped on by a giant foot, we might obsess about being squashed by a Big Box Competitor.

And instead of literally bursting into flames, we wake up in the middle of the night, in a cold sweat, worrying that one day our customers will abandon us, and our business will internally combust and go up in smoke.

In truth, unlike Ramsey’s worries, these small business analogies actually could happen.

But instead of living a frightened and miserable life worrying about them, we should put all of that brain energy into doing what we can to make sure any competitor would be hard-pressed to take our customers away.

Let’s stop worrying about fighting a price war with the Big Boxes. Here’s a news flash: That war is over and we lost. Let’s deliver our stuff so well that price is virtually not an issue.

We should stop obsessing about foreign competitors. They may have what our customers nee, but they don’t know what our customers want.

We must know so much about what customers want, and how they want it, that by the time they decide when they want it, the image of our brand in their mind, to paraphrase William “Heat” Moon, will actually remember itself.

Write this on a rock…
Don’t live a frightened and miserable life. Replace worry with action and performance.