Entrepreneurship story: The secret to building a business is self-confidence

There was a business executive who was deep in debt and could not find a way out of it. Creditors were chasing him, suppliers were demanding their due. Everything was going against him. He sat on a park bench, head in hands, wondering if anything could save his company. He lost his self-confidence, the one thing that brought him where he was.

Suddenly an old man appeared before him. “I can see that something is troubling you,” he said. After listening to the executive’s woes, the old man said, “I believe that I can help you.” He asked the man his name, wrote out a check, and pushed it into his hand saying, “Take this money and meet me here exactly one year from today, and you can pay me back then” Then he turned and disappeared quickly.

The business executive saw in his hand a check for $500,000, signed by John D. Rockefeller, then one of the richest men in the world! “I can put an end to woes in a second!” he said to himself. But instead, the executive decided to put the uncashed check as it is. Just knowing it was there might give him the strength to work out a way to save his business, he thought.

With renewed optimism and self-confidence, he negotiated better deals and extended terms of payment. He closed several big sales. Within a few months, he was out of debt and started making money once again.

Exactly one year later, he returned to the park with the same uncashed check. At the agreed-upon time, the old man appeared. But just as the executive was about to hand back the check and about to tell his story to the old man, a nurse came running up and grabbed the old man. “I’m so glad I caught him!” she cried. “I hope he hasn’t been bothering you. He’s always escaping from the rest home and telling people he’s John D. Rockefeller.” And she took the old man away by the arm.

The astonished executive just stood there, stunned. All year long he’d been wheeling and dealing, buying and selling, convinced he had half a million dollars behind him. Suddenly, he realized that it wasn’t the money, real or imagined, that had turned his life around. It was his newfound self-confidence that gave him the power to achieve anything he went after.