The Power of Friendship

I wanted to do a website like this for a long time ( I no it doesn’t seem like much but it will expand in the next few months.) In fact I came up with a similar idea about a year ago. I wanted to do it with my friends as a way for ME to work on my writing and for us to make money (honestly.) I was so excited about the idea that I called one of my friends and told him about it, asking him if he wanted to help. But that may have been my mistake. When he heard my “business plan”, he did nothing short of shooting it right down, reminding me that a lot of people are already doing websites like this. Instead of saying, “but No one has our opinions!” or “but we could at least try and see what happens.” (I wish I said that. Maybe you all would be visiting a full -on website by now and not just the framework.) I forgot about it. That’s the power friendships can have. Well, at least the negative power because I never second guessed it. Now of course that could be a reflection of me. The kinda person I was and everything. And it is in a way because I’ve grown up a lot of the year and as you can see NO ONE is telling me what to do. The thing is we value our friendships and when we are in need of advice or recommendation or acceptance we hope they will be truthful. That particular friend wasn’t thinking outside the box and in his eyes, his response was him being truthful. And I let that make the decision for me which was stupid.
It happened again earlier this year when I came up with another idea. A close friend of mine (he knows who he is) speaks Spanish and I wanted to use that and my writing for another “business idea”. I remember coming up with the idea from top to bottom. I even had the money and marketing etched out. And when I told him, not only did he think it was a good idea, he was willing to help. So we spent the time (we work together) hashing out ideas of how it would work out. Now just to let you know, this idea had been done many times before but there was and still is room for more. The problem: my friend isn’t the most motivated person I no and needless to say a couple of days later his interest in it seemed to be circling the zero percentile margin. Instead of saying your loss, I scrapped the idea completely.
A couple months later I was watching The Montel Williams Show. He had a special about young millionaires or inventors or something like that. And he had a girl on there who basically had done exactly what I wanted to do. And not only was she on a nationally syndication talk show promoting her product but she was in talks with a major retailer to distribute them. Which one? Wal-mart. When I saw this, I wasn’t to happy. I mean I was happy for her. I’m glad she stuck to something and was successful. But I was mad at myself and mad at my friend (who doesn’t know it until now when he reads this) for not being more eager to better himself. I know it comes from fear. Taking a risk is hard to do. I just wish he was willing because it would have helped. Because of that episode, I started working on my novel again. My step father recently told me that while your coming up with ideas someone else is actually doing it and he’s right. And now I am!
My point is that sometimes friends are wrong. Sometimes its all about the risk. The risk of succeeding or failing has better results than the risk of not trying at all. I know that now as I said. I just had to listen to the right voice (my heart) and not the wrong one.