Article Overview: I recently saw Ted Turner being interviewed on CNN. The interviewer asked Ted how he kept going when his sailing team lost year after year and his baseball team was in last place for four years before going on to win the World Series.
Without any hesitation Ted said, “I wasn’t losing, I was learning how to win.”
Free Download - The world doesn’t pay for what you know, but for………. By Dan Miller
I Wasn't Losing……..
I recently saw Ted Turner being interviewed on CNN. Theinterviewerasked Ted how he kept going when his sailingteamlost year after year and his baseballteamwas in last place for four years before going on to win the World Series.
Without any hesitation Ted said, “I wasn’t losing, I waslearninghow to win.”
How’s that for a different approach to the situations we are all confronted with? If you’re in ajobyou hate, has thattimebeen a waste or was it necessary for you to clarify what you really want to be doing?
If you just had abusinessfailure, have you lost “everything” or do you now know more aboutwinninginbusinessthan you ever have? If your marriage is on the rocks are you losing or “learning how to win” in that important relationship?
It seems that I hear from a lot of people who are convinced they have wasted years of their lives pursuing the wrong career, sticking with the wrong job, or getting the wrong degree. Would you really have been able to discover the rightcareerorjobwithout that first experience? Maybe we just need to “re-frame” some of our experiences. Trust me, it feels better to know that I am “learning how to win” than to think that I have spenttimeonly to “lose.” Don’t get used to losing – it doesn’t have to endure forever. Even the sluggardcollegestudent eventually graduates. Mark your graduation date now and move on.
So if you just got fired, believe that you were “learning how to win.” If you bombed on your golfgamethis weekend, understand that you were “learning how to win.” If you hit your thumb with a hammer, think that you were “learning how to win.” If last week’s receipts for yourbusinesswere $300 and your expenses were $500, believe that you were “learning how to win.”
Just believe - "I wasn't losing, I waslearninghow to win."
Dan Miller, President of 48 Days LLC, specializes in creative thinking for increased personal and business success. He believes that meaningful work blends our natural skills and abilities, our unique personality traits and our dreams and passions. Dan is active in helping individuals redirect careers, evaluate new income sources, and achieve balanced living. He believes that a clear sense of direction can help us become all that God designed us to be.
Dan is the author of the widely acclaimed 48 Days To The Work You Love and No More Mondays. He writes regularly for many popular magazines and web portals, including CBN.com, Crosswalk.com, In Touch, AARP and Success magazines and the Zig Ziglar newsletter. He has been a guest on CBS' 'The Early Show,' MSNBC's 'Hardball with Chris Mathews,' 700 Club's Living the Life and Fox Business News with Dave Ramsey Show...to hit some highlights. He hosts a weekly podcast that is consistently ranked #1 under Careers on iTunes. Dan is also a frequent speaker and guest on popular radio programs like Moody Broadcasting, Crown Financial, Janet Parshall’s America, American Family Radio, and Prime Time Chicago.
Committed to personal priorities, Dan and wife Joanne have been happily married for over 41 years. Each of their three grown children works in the family business in some capacity, and they enjoy spending time with their 6 grandchildren.
Related Forum Posts Richard Branson's Book
- Richard Branson's Book "Losing My Virginity" is a must read for people starting their own business.
Losing My Virginity
- I would like to second what Jennifer said about the recommendation of Richard Branson's book, "Losing My Virginity." This story-line book shows the inner-workings of the brilliant entrepreneur from his beginnings at age 11 when he first started his own magazine publication. This will allow a glimpse into the personality and mind-set that allowed Richard Branson to eventually become the entrepreneurial success that he is today.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED. A very informative read.
-Brandon
Books for Women Entrepreneurs
- There's a thread for good books in the Resources folder, but it doesn't target books for businesswomen particularly, so I figured I'd start such a thread here.
It doesn't matter how successful you are in your business - it's always possible to learn something new.
In subsequent posts I give Table of Contents and brief descriptions for various titles - most of them devoted to the businesswoman - and sometimes a review. If anyone else has read a review, or has read the book and found it useful, please comment!
1. The Old Girl's Network
2. Mother's Work
3. The 7 Greatest Truths About Successful Women
4. Pitch Like A Girl
5. Workplace Warrior
6. Treasure Hunt: Inside the Mind of the Modern Consumer
7. Contingency Planning & Disaster Recovery
8. She Wins, You Win
9. Napoleon On Project Management
10. Why Good Girls Dont' Get Ahead, But Gutsy Girls Do
11. Comeback Moms: How to Leave Work, Raise Children, and Restart your Career even If you Haven't Had a Job in Years
12. The One Minute Millionaire
13. Talking From 9 to 5
14. Soloing: Realizing Your Life's Ambitions
15. 101 Best Home Based Businesses for Women: Everything You Need to Know About Getting Started on the Road To Success
16. Work With Passion: How to Do What You Love for a Living. Revised and Expanded
17. Fail-Proof Your Business: Beat the Odds and be Successful
18. Confidence: How Winning Streaks and Losing Streaks Begin and End
19. Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide
20. Millionaire Women Next Door: The Many Journeys of Successful American Businesswomen
21. Start Small, Finish Big: Fifteen Key Lessons to Start - and Run - Your Own Successful Business
22. Rewired, Rehired or Retired: A Global Guide for the Experienced Worker
23. The Martha Rules: 10 essentials for achieving success as you start, build or manage a business
24. The Essentials of Entrepreneurship: What it takes to create Successful Enterprises
25. Net Ready: Strategies for Success in the E-conomy
26. The Promotable Woman
27. Leave The Office Earlier: The Productivity Pro shows you how to do more in less time and feel great about it
28. The Work At Home Balancing Act: The professional resource guide for managing yourself, your work, and your family at home
29. Secrets of Six-Figure Women
Meet Mary Sue Milliken - chef and restaurant owner
- Mary Sue Milliken will be at our "Launching an Edible Life" event February 4 in Los Angeles ... come join us!
Contact aswift@ladieswholaunch.com for registration details.
If there's just one thing you need to open a restaurant, it would have to be a stove, right? Think again. When Mary Sue Milliken and her best friend/fellow chef/business partner Susan Feniger opened City Cafe in Los Angeles in 1981, they had no stove or oven, only a hot plate and a hibachi out back in the alley.
Humble digs, especially for two professionally trained chefs-Milliken had attended Washburne Culinary Institute, while Feniger studied at the Culinary Institute of America. Their resumes included stints at three-star restaurants in France, Spago in Los Angeles, and Le Perroquet in Chicago, where they met in 1978-the first women working in that restaurant's all-male kitchen.
Rich in experience and vision, but not in funds, they were happy to have a restaurant to call their own and quickly began perfecting a unique, multicultural fare, which incorporated recipes from Greek, Indian, and Thai cultures, as well as their own mothers' recipes. Once they expanded to City Restaurant in 1985, they became culinary icons, recognized for their fresh mix of refined culinary technique and exotic Third World flavors, all dished up with down-home charm and playful enthusiasm.
Now overseeing 375 employees between the Border Grill restaurants in Santa Monica and Las Vegas and Ciudad in downtown Los Angeles, the partners have also found time to write five cookbooks, including the recent Mexican Cooking Essentials for Dummies; host the popular Food Network shows "Too Hot Tamales" and "Tamales World Tour"; and launch the Border Girls brand at Whole Foods Market.
What we learned from Mary Sue:
Not every venture will be successful, but every experience will be worthwhile. "You've got to bounce back and just keep going. They're all great lessons to learn."
Words of Wisdom
"I think we both subconsciously were willing to start in a really meager setting, just because it was an opportunity not to work for a man."
Penniless But Passionate
"We had come home [from France] with the intent to open a restaurant together, and we didn't have a penny to our names. I was 23 years old. I had not been to college. I had no idea how to launch a business. None. Susan had a degree in economics and had been to chef's school. She's five years older than me. But she also didn't have any idea how to launch a business."
Cook What You Know
"First of all, you just copy things. But then, it starts to be a very personal cuisine, which is what we basically used those three-and-half years at City Cafe for-to create our own personal style of food. And it was so well-received. It started out as country French food, and it kept expanding all the time."
Eclecticism, Not Fusion
"We did some really groundbreaking stuff. This was in 1984, and still, when our City Cuisine cookbook came out in '87, people said there's nowhere to put this book on the shelves of the cookbook aisles, because you guys are all over the map. And there just wasn't that kind of integration of different culinary ideas. We never called what we did "fusion." We always felt like we stayed very true to the Greek cuisine, or the Indian, or the Thai, or the Mexican, or the Scandinavian, or whatever it was."
On-the-Job Training
We slowly started learning about business, so when we launched City Restaurant, which was really the thing that put us on the map, it was a 125-seat restaurant with a full-on kitchen. It was on La Brea. We raised the $660,000, and had to do a whole prospectus. I'll never forget, my net worth was $12,000, and Susan's wasn't much more. But we were able to learn by the seat of our pants, and we've been learning ever since."
How Much Is Enough?
"We were just making educated guesses-or uneducated guesses. In the end, $660,000 was not enough money at all. We were completely short, and we had to get an angel to come in and sign a guarantee on a bank line of credit for us. Really, it was a stressful opening, because we only had like two-and-a-half days in the kitchen with food before we had to open the doors to the public because we were so broke."
Hindsight Is 20/20
"If I knew then what I know now, I would have somehow found some financial bridge so that we could have had a little more practice before we opened. I mean, literally, the first couple weeks, there were nights that we didn't even go home, and we were really burning the candle down to zero."
It's a Man's World
"I think we were both ready to be on our own. And the prospect of working under men, and working our way up, and trying to fight through all of the barriers, looked less fulfilling than just starting out [on our own]. Even though we didn't even have a stove, we still opted to start out calling our own shots."
Know When to Grow
"The growth ... it's a really personal thing. It depends on how equipped you are for the challenge and stress of growth, and how your business is doing. I mean, we've grown where things worked out really well, and we've grown where it's created a big strain on the existing businesses, and the new businesses didn't work."
On Losing Money
"When I look back on it, I think, 'Well, I didn't go to college. That's about how much college might cost me. I'll just chalk it up to experience.' Now I have an even better understanding, and luckily, it didn't happen at a time when I really couldn't afford it. But I'll tell you, being an entrepreneur and being in business is a real roller coaster."
A Thankless Job Has Its Rewards
"When the Food Network came asking for us to come and promote our second book, and they noticed we were funny and how we finished each other's sentences, they said, 'You girls should have a TV show.' The reason we should have had a TV show was that we did all of this really thankless teaching before that, and I'm not even sure it brought bodies into the restaurant. A lot of people might have looked at it as a waste of time. But I think you never know what skill you're going to develop, [and our teaching gave us the skills we needed to do the Food Network show.]"
Be a Great Boss
"We learn a lot from our colleagues, and from other companies that we want to be like. We're always looking for innovative ways to really make our workplace so phenomenally attractive that we can't lose good people, and we can attract the best. Those are big goals for us all the time."
My Most Rewarding Business Moments...
"... are when one of our past employees mentions how working for us made a difference in their lives. It's the best feeling in the world!"
Be Good at Everything
"You have to be a great leader, as well as a great cook, as well as organized, because it's a business of so many details. I think there are a lot of restaurants that fall through the cracks because they're missing the boat on something, and customers just don't come back."
All Work and No Play
"You have to be willing to walk away when you have a pile of work on your desk and stuff that you really should get done. You've got to be willing to walk away and clear your mind and be in the moment with your children or your husband, or whoever. You have to convince yourself that it's equally, or more, important than your job."
This Featured Lady was profiled by Sarah Tomlinson, a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.
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