This one goes out to all of you entrepreneurs who have ever looked at the Steve Jobs and Bill Gates of your industry. Who have prodded and poked at their lives, comparing your talent, drive, ambition and intelligence against theirs. This one goes out to all of you who, in the final summation, have found yourselves to be equal to this kings among men and have been left wondering why they have made it so far while you are still left puttering around in your garage.

I have an answer for you. Time.

No, I am not saying that 15 years is all you’ll need to become a billionaire, but I am saying that it is naive to ignore the fact that anyone who has achieved a great deal of success in their field has done so over the course of time. We all have the tendency to look at the end of someone’s career, the fame, fortune and prestige that they have achieved and project all of that back to the beginning. We assume that they were always well respected, that they were always adored and that because we haven’t achieved this level of renown in the three months we have been working on our projects, we will never get there.

This is quite simply false.

Everyone earns their stripes, one way or another. Some people have an easier road, but honestly some people have a much harder one. Instead of comparing yourself to the pioneers of your field, try to learn something from the way they have lived their lives. In many instances, you only get real perspective on who they are and how they got where they are when you allow yourself to see their failings alongside their triumphs.

If you don’t believe me, this is a snippet from an interview with Bill Gates done by the Smithsonian Institute,

There were a lot of mis-steps in the early days, but because we got in early we got to make more mistakes than other people. I had customers who went bankrupt and didn’t pay us. Customers who we spent a lot of time with who never built microcomputer-based machines.

. . .

In Retail Marketing, we made a number of mistakes that were important for us to learn from. We had in a few countries, agents. And you really don’t want to use agents. You want to have your own people. If you are going to be a serious company, take a long-term approach. You should hire people in all the countries you are going to be in and make sure they are there cementing long-term relationships — not just generating short-term commissions. I think we learned that one pretty quickly. We did hire in some very sharp business people, and got them to share their experience so it wasn’t just us technical guys and the other people. We were very young. I mean, Steve and I were kind of driving the business and Paul and I were driving the technology. We were optimistic in thinking we could get things done sometimes faster than what we did. The project of the moment always seemed very exciting. And some of them never generated much in the way of royalties. But all correctable stuff as long as we sort of wake up and see what the results were.

Next time you’re sitting around wondering where you went wrong, why your first BETA product hasn’t catapulted you to the highest echelons of your industry, take a few moments to gain some perspective and recognize that it’s only the beginning and you have a long, long road ahead of you.

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