Watching the London Marathon really inspired me this year. All the money raising stories and reasons for people running brought me out in goose bumps, but it wasn’t this that gave me inspiration. It was the winning male athlete Tsegaye Kebede.
Tsegaye is from Ethopia, born in 1987 one of 13 children, 4 years ago he was collecting fire wood and earning less than £0.20 ($0.30) per day. He enjoyed running as a youngster but as you can imagine wasn’t fortunate enough to benefit from professional training. That was until 2006 when he entered the Addis Ababa half marathon and was spotted by a professional athletics coach who invited him to train with them. Winning the Abebe Bikila International Marathon in Addis Ababa later that year.
In 4 years an unknown Ethopian raised himself from poverty to an international athlectics star. Like many Internet start-ups rising from nothing to make a mark on the business world.
But behind Tsegaye, as well as these start-ups, is a huge amount of talent and a great amount of passion. For every Marathon winner and start-up success there are thousands of failures. Other than passion and talent they all have another feature in common, their route to success took time.
Success = Passion x Talent x Time
So why is it that with such an obvious formula, many small businesses expect their online presence to return instant rewards? Why do they expect to be number one in the search engines, have thousands of followers on Facebook & Twitter? Did they hire the best people, did they put their heart into it and did they dedicate enough resource to make it happen?
Most of the time the honest answer is no and the formula fails.
Anyway, the inspiration that drove me to write this post wasn’t quite finished with me, my entry for the 2011 London Marathon has been submitted. I will be using ALL of the components of my formula to ensure I reach my version of success.
