Don't let culture block your path to success

What you need to know:

  • Some people who may have failed to make it in academics and felt rejected by communities that places high value in education, more often than not pop up somewhere, having excelled in totally unexpected areas. 
  • The challenge, however, is how to divorce subliminal cultural persuasions from pathways to change

  • Some of the failures in enterprise are caused by the level of commitments an entrepreneur is confronted with from the community. 

Does failure or rejection breed success in entrepreneurship? 

This question is a source of my curiosity regarding what I perceive to be a role of both - surprise, surprise - negative and positive energy in our wellbeing. 

Over the years, the more people I talk to, the clearer it becomes that the threat of failure or being afraid, dissatisfied, anxious and doubtful usually has an impact in entrepreneurship and could be a factor of success. 

There could be a threshold, however, at which positive energy replaces negative energy, or some awakening.  One cannot embrace negativity in perpetuity and succeed.

Chances are you know someone who, in early their days, may have seemed a failure or rejected by society for some reason, yet leveraged that very negative energy to succeed greatly. 

It is not, however, negativity that propels such people to some success, but rather their innate ability to convert negative energy into positive energy.

Some people who may have failed to make it in academics and felt rejected by communities that place high value in education, more often than not pop up somewhere, having excelled in totally unexpected areas. 

Most African cultures predispose their members to stress with single-minded expectations. We fail to explore multiple career opportunities to determine one’s talent and lack respect for different talents as sources of livelihood.

My experience in mentoring young people has taught me that most communities have just too much negative energy toward entrepreneurship. 

Some young people, who seemingly have a great entrepreneurial idea, would take advantage of the relationship we developed to ask for assistance in getting a job, since nobody in their village or home has ever succeeded in entrepreneurship.  This defeatist mentality is hard for them to overcome in the absence of role models in their communities.

INGRAINED CULTURAL TRADITIONS

David McClelland’s pioneering research at the Harvard Psychological Clinic in the 1930s, summarised in Explorations in Personality, provided the start point for future studies of personality, especially those relating to needs and motives. 

His “investigations of achievement motivation have particular relevance to the emergence of leadership. He was interested in the possibility of deliberately arousing a motive to achieve in an attempt to explain how individuals express their preferences for particular outcomes—a general problem of motivation. In this connection, the need for achievement refers to an individual's preference for success under conditions of competition.”

Many mentees fail the “Need to Achieve” test, which is often caused by an avalanche of negative energy that they receive from other people within their circles. 

There must be a drive or some motive within an entrepreneur’s mind for him or her to succeed.  It is difficult to impossible to plant the seed of motive to achieve in a society where many wealthy people may never have achieved riches through entrepreneurship. 

Although this need to accumulate is widespread in African countries, it should never be used as an excuse to avoid developing a new narrative for developing a new crop of moral leaders in entrepreneurship.

The journey of life is such that we shall certainly undergo all manner of experiences, miseries, pleasures and interactions with other people.  It is our insights of negative or positive energy that have the biggest inspiration. 

Our orientation toward negativity or positivity clouds how we see life in its entirety.  Perhaps this is why we fail to change the ingrained cultural traditions that stand in the way of success.

GATEWAY TO ENTITLEMENTS

The challenge, however, is how to divorce subliminal cultural persuasions from pathways to change. Clinical psychologist and relationship expert, Carmen Harra, says:

Every energetic encounter, no matter how slight or fleeting, leaves an impression on our own field of energy. But what happens when we meet less-than-positive people and must merge with their dark disposition? This too comes with our daily dose of interaction, and since we can’t always help who’s around us, we must learn to block out energies that are detrimental to our morale.

Harra recommends several simple steps to banish bad energy from others and uplift your own energetic essence. These are:

  • identifying the people around you who are most likely to express negative energy;

  • analysing how their negative energy is depriving your own state of being;

  • most importantly, you should not have to “put up with” anyone’s bad mood on a daily basis, whether the person is your boss, family member, or spouse;

  • developing the ability to sense when someone’s energy become toxic or contrary to your position;

  • trying to retreat to a place of solitude;

  • resisting others from taping into your field of energy; your energetic territory is your very own personal space of being;

  • ensuring that your energetic levels determine the precious, sometimes irreversible decisions you make;

  • and just as we exercise our bodies, we must also exercise our emotions.  

Some of the suggestions Harra proposes are not easy to implement since it doesn’t come as naturally as we think. Negative energy not only has a way of impacting our decision-making ability but also sometimes impacts on our health.  Sometimes personal biases colour the way we think and often impact on our wellbeing.  

The situation is made more even more complex considering that in African traditions, we feel those around us so passionately that at times we own their emotions. 

In some cultures, it is expected that you own your close relatives’ emotions, whether positive or negative. For example, entrepreneurial success in some African contexts is a gateway to entitlements amongst relatives, which may put a strain on the enterprise. 

REJECTION AND FAILURE

Some failures in enterprise are caused by the commitments an entrepreneur is confronted with by the community.  The more resources an entrepreneur accumulates, the greater the number of pressing community financial needs, often through fundraising, where the moneyed are expected to contribute more than 95 per cent, failure to which the community could ostracise a successful entrepreneur.

Although negative energy plays a role in success, it is the act of converting our negative energy into positive energy that eventually leads to success. In life, we will always face challenges, rejection, and failure but all these attributes are tools for revising your strategy for success. 

Culture should never distort that which we think is the best pathway to success. To succeed in entrepreneurship, we must have the right motivations and as McClelland stated, the “need to achieve” must be present irrespective of our background.

Famed American basketball legend, Michael Jordan, once said, “If you're trying to achieve, there will be roadblocks. I've had them; everybody has had them. But obstacles don't have to stop you. If you run into a wall, don't turn around and give up. Figure out how to climb it, go through it, or work around it.”

Achievements don’t come on a silver platter. We must translate negative energies within us into positive ones and remove the cultural walls to succeed.   

The writer is an associate professor at University of Nairobi’s School of Business. Twitter: @bantigito