Lynn Smith

It's the only way I have survived entrepreneurship and continue to survive entrepreneurship.

I mean, John, I'm sure you've experienced these times where I wanted to burn my business down earlier this week.

And I said to my husband, who's also an entrepreneur, I was like, I want to burn my business to the ground.

What do you think about that?

And he's like, let's not do that.

And I needed to remind myself, like, just keep going, keep going.

And it was such an important lesson in my life that I thought, why did I have to wait until my 40s to learn this?

Couldn't we learn it when we're four?

And can't we learn this in the classroom and not the boardroom?

That when we are faced with fear or rejection or failure, that we can take one more step or take a deep breath and a moment or jump up and down to get our blood flowing, to get our minds straight, to get back into that game day mentality of just one foot in front of the other.

that you will get to your destination if you put one foot in front of the other, if you just keep going.

And so every rejection I got, I, of course, felt, oh, right.

You know, that feeling again, again, like when is this going to happen?

It was years and years and years of rejections.

And so when we finally got that, yes,

It was so much sweeter because of how hard it was to get there.

But also I remember saying to my agent, I said, you know what?

I was meant to go through this.

because it's what the book's all about.

And I think everybody can have a version of that, whether it's a book, it's a relationship, it's a job that you're holding out for, whatever it is in your life that's that version of that.