Well you all love the arsehole post – it seemed to resonate with so many of you – and typical responses I got were, ‘Thanks for the blog, but I feel arseholes are everywhere and the bigger my business grows, the more I seem to find. Help!’
It seems there’s a lot of it about. And you know what you can do to avoid it? Shut yourself in a padded room, disengage with the wider community and shuffle off to your hermit-like abode. Because the buggers are everywhere.
And if you haven’t experienced this yet, you can bet your bottom dollar you will. Because the more people you are exposed to the more it will seem someone left the gate open at the arsehole farm…like Michael Caine says in Zulu ‘there’s thousands of them’!
It’s all based on what I call the arsehole ratio. As your empire expands the percentage of A-holes does not increase pro-rata – it’s just the actual volume that you are exposed to increases.
And then it gets really hard not to toughen yourself up, or to join their ranks. Because after a while – if you are being treated badly even occasionally, it can taint your perception of humanity.
And it’s your challenge to rise above it. Not get angry, not get even. Rise above it, focus on your business, take it in your stride – make sure your exposure to damage is minimized – but focus on the good – not the bad and plough on with your mission undeterred by the baddies out there. You simply cannot taint your perspective of humanity simply because you get exposed to more appalling behaviour as your business expands.
As entrepreneurs we are optimists. As entrepreneurs, we can also be – myself especially – almost delusional in our positivity. Arsehole prevention measures include the following: due diligence, vigorous recruitment hurdles, bullet proof terms and conditions ‘I’ dotting and ‘T’ crossing of your procedures, rigorous credit control and – if you were like me and screwed over fairly regularly – you have to accept your own culpability and naivety in this –and start putting in checks and balances to preserve yourself.
Prevention preserves not only your assets but your positivity too. And this will be the greatest loss if you let yourselves become overwhelmed by the nasty people outlined above.
If your arsehole prevention measures haven’t worked – then don’t lose the faith. If you have a flurry of them it’s because you are raising your head above the parapet – and you have to do that to succeed. So it’s all about getting your defences and prevention strategies in place – and remembering the world is not full of them – it’s just that you, unlike the vanilla mates of yours (people in normal jobs) get exposed to a lot more people – and it’s just the A-hole ratio in play – not a global conspiracy. Keep your peckers up – if not someone else’s – and I’ll speak to you real soon!
Take care.