Entrepreneur Daily How to succeed again (and again!)

Recently, I met an entrepreneur who’d built his own golden handcuffs. His e-commerce business does more than $1 million in sales every year, and makes him a handsome return. But he’s unhappy. The site is boring to operate. He wants to do something else. And yet, he doesn’t. Why? Because he’s unsure if he can be successful at anything else. What if, he fears, this is it? What if this is all he’s good at?

This is the downside of success, and I see it a lot. Once we’ve reached some level of achievement, many of us lose our appetite for risk. We groan at the idea of starting fresh, or of pushing beyond. We become trapped maintaining what we have, rather than building bigger, or better, or simply anew. And for everyone who’s ever faced this, I offer you our new cover profile of Danica Patrick. She just retired from racing, and we sent a reporter to Indianapolis to follow her during her final days. She admitted to us that, for quite a while, she’d stopped loving the sport of racing. But rather than fear those final days, she prepared for them—by methodically building new businesses, and finding new interests, and assembling the bridge she’d one day cross.

I love that approach. Let us celebrate success but not be trapped by it. Let us use our success as fuel, propelling us wherever we want to go. We entrepreneurs are doers and achievers. Nothing should hold us back—not even our good fortune.

Below, I’ve included this and a few more of my favorite stories from our new, July/August issue. Enjoy!

Jason Feifer
jfeifer@entrepreneur.com
@heyfeifer heyfeifer