By: Scotty Weiss

It was only 21 months ago when my Nike Janowskis first set foot on the campus of the University of Colorado Boulder, and it feels like it was yesterday. Never being to a campus before, the size was intimidating, seeing how the school fostered the education of thirty or so thousand young adults.

Jumping into this new experience provided me the pleasure and opportunity of a fresh start. High school was great, but there was a discontent within myself that growled at me to break out of my introverted shell.

The first few weeks were pure excitement and energy that not only pulsed through my veins, but the entire dorm ecosystem. People were quickly forming their new clicks and solidifying their friendships that would build throughout the year. Naturally I slowly mingled my way and became ingrained with the guys that filled our basement hall. There wasn’t really a problem for me with that, and luckily the guys in my hall were pretty fun. However, as the weeks continued on one thing had become apparent. These ideas of being different and standing out were crushed with old habits that I had failed to scrub away. The major pain point was girls. Naturally as most guys do they want to be successful with women and I struggled with this a lot. The thought and action of conversing with girls had become awkward with my lack of self-confidence and shyness. This was a social disaster recipe. Something needed to be done, and what was needed was for me to take action.

My whole life has been peppered with lack of action and risk adverse tendencies, so the first action I took was in the form of books and online articles. Months went by with my brain chewing on the messages and techniques described, but it was of no use. The texts were filled with great information, but they all called for one thing. Action. My body refused to accept. “I’ll just read a few more articles” was a common thought swirling in my head. At the time I could have been an “expert” on the subject of how to get women, but I couldn’t execute. Every Friday and Saturday night thoughts of being extroverted came to mind, but often ended back at square one. This method was not working and I needed to pivot.

In desperation to try and improve myself I began to fail. There is this saying that if you tell yourself a lie long enough that you will actually start to believe it, and for me it became true. I started to remind myself constantly to be confident and not overvalue people’s opinions on me. This was my first moment of action. I began engrossing myself socially and fighting my social fear. This allowed me to have more opportunities to interact with people, and I slowly began to crack the shell. There were now more opportunities for success, but more importantly failure.

Rewind a few years there was friend of mine that changed my life in a profound way. This friend introduced me to the idea of entrepreneurship but also mentioned something that I still live by today.

“If you’re not failing you’re not trying hard enough”

The great thing was that I did fail, a lot. There were many embarrassing moments and awkward conversations, but it taught me that girls are people and there was no reason to be afraid.

Nearly 99% of failure won’t kill you, yet for so many years the thought of it froze me. I was ignoring something that is wildly more important. The chance of success. The realization came after I had become fully confident in myself that you cant be scared of people or the world.

So you may be sitting there wondering, what does this all have to do with entrepreneurship?

A large percentage of people including myself are classified as wantrepreneurs. As I have begun my journey to crack my entrepreneurial shell I have noticed my path in entrepreneurship mirrors my struggles of opening up socially. One can do all the reading and research on marketing and scaling your idea, but it’s all useless if you don’t undertake the challenge. It’s vital that you take the action and not fear failure.

You need to know how to run a business and the way to do that is to actually start running one. As Seth Godin once said “You can’t read a book about sex and be good in the sack”

So to all of you entrepreneurs out there with an idea or not take action and don’t be afraid to fail. Trust your gut, get motivated, and be confident with not only yourself but that you and your business have the potential for success.