 Born on Sunday, 21st September 1947, in Portland, United States, the young boy grew up to love writing. He wanted to be a successful writer, but that wouldn't come very easily. Stephen Edward King wrote his first short story, but nobody read it. The second short story was rejected, and the third followed. One night, Edward started another work. It is a story about a young girl he called Carrietta. He wrote the story in the middle of the night, and when he woke up in the morning, he thought that the story wasn't good enough. After all, this is a man who had written three books without any success. Stephen King trashed the short story he had just written and went out to his day job, but his wife, Tabitha, had a better idea. She believes there is no harm in trying, and she convinced her husband to complete the story of Carrietta and get it published. By January 1973, King submitted his story to the publisher, and a different thing happened. Now, he was accepted, and his first successful work was published. From that point, Stephen King goes on to become one of the most successful writers the world has ever seen. Now, let's think about this. What if Stephen King had successfully trashed that story that made him famous, or he had stopped writing after a few failures? Well, maybe we would never have heard from him. Now, pay attention to this. Every creative entrepreneur knows they do not know the market, so they continue trying to offer the market the best they think they could offer until the market accepts one of their products. Yes, as entrepreneurs, we study human psychology, marketing, sales, and human relationship. We study to know about the human nature, so we can exploit the opportunities such knowledge gives us. Even with all our curiosity, we still don't know the market as much as we usually think we do, because you cannot know what the market would accept or reject. Your best bet is to keep on planting your seeds of creativity. Persistence had died. In my humble opinion, I think Mr. Persistence has died for most people in this generation. Everywhere I look, I see people who want to become successful by tomorrow morning. Where I look, I see people who pursue different shiny objects, hoping they could get rich by some chance or luck. Truly, creative people don't do or expect that. If you're an entrepreneur, a writer, a musician, or even a scientist, you must be wise enough to know that your first few works or products are not likely to be accepted by the market, for whatever reasons. Because of this understanding, you wouldn't just write a book and expect that a single book make you a million dollars. You wouldn't just release a musical album and expect that single album to make you the most famous musician in the world. As an entrepreneur, you won't create a product or two and expect those will make you rich. Don't get me wrong, it does happen sometimes that people's first work become successful, but such cases are very rare. What is common is the story of someone who has been in a particular industry before, experienced some failures and then moved to another industry, then have great successes in that new industry. This happened to me with my first book. Before I wrote my first book, I had been in the business world for about five years. With my failures and experience in the business world, writing a book about entrepreneurship made my first book succeed more than I ever imagined. Sleeping With Your Sword The reason why I made this video is to inspire you as a creative individual to keep your sword always by your side, because you don't know when the enemy may strike. If you're an entrepreneur, you just have to be obsessed with the business world. If you're a writer, you have to write every day of your life. If you're a scientist, you must sleep in the laboratory and if you're a musician, your room should be a studio and your duty should be to write songs every day of your life till the world knows that you're there. Sleeping With Your Sword Sleeping With Your Sword is the only way you can be ready for the enemy. Being obsessed with your work, your business or your art is the only way you can see breakthrough for the world to see. If you cannot do what you do every day of your life, if you cannot sleep on it and wake up on it, if you cannot offer your new product, new book or new art to the market, why do you think you deserve success? But why is it that hard? The problem most people have is that they wonder why it is so hard to be successful as an entrepreneur or as a creative individual. I have some ideas and I'll share them with you. You see, being creative means that you're walking against the crowd. It simply means you're trying to do what no one has ever done. It simply means that you're trying to be who most people will never be. Expecting this journey to be easy is one of the biggest mistakes you can ever make. I think I'm so lucky because when I started as an entrepreneur, I never expected any significant success in the first decade. Yes, I was young and that was an advantage but regardless of how old you are, you have to understand that the market doesn't care. One other thing I need you to understand is that most of the creative work simply means that you will be required to do something very new and accepted. To be successful in business, for example, you have to do something new. To be successful as a writer, you have to write something new or reform a new perspective. You can't be a successful scientist or an inventor except you show the world what we never knew. To be successful in any creative field, you have to try something new and that's where the problem is. There's a problem with something new because if it's new, nobody knows what the market will think about it. Let me give you some examples. You and I know what the market thinks about a good lawyer. We all know what the market thinks about a good accountant, doctor or engineer. We know that if you're a good accountant, some company might pay you well. If you're a good doctor or lawyer, you'll be paid well. These fields are predictable because they do not involve breaking the rules or creating a new or strange thing. But when you talk about inventions or creations of an idea, products or businesses, you have to break some rules and risk. Creating something new and the market may just reject you for whatever reason. An example of this is Dean Kamen's Segway. Before Segway was launched in the year 2001, Kamen had been able to raise billions of dollars. The idea was so great that even the smartest people in the world, people like Steve's job, even fell for it. And that's why the creative work is hard. You simply cannot tell what the market will accept or reject. So what is the message of this video? Very simple. Keep on creating. Keep on writing. Keep on researching. Keep on making your art. No matter what area of creative endeavor you find yourself, remember the story of Stephen King. The work he thought could never be accepted by the market was the one the market accepted. You simply cannot tell what the market will accept, do your best to study the market and to give it your best work. But when the market rejects you, know that it has always been like that. Keep on creating because your next work might just be what will announce you to the world. Thank you very much.