In 1910, Theodore Roosevelt gave a speech titled “The Man in the Arena” at the Sorbonne in Paris. From that speech comes this famous quote:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
I’ve had a post about this quote in mind since I started writing the blog, but I couldn’t remember who said it or how exactly it went, so the few times I’ve gone looking for it I came up empty-handed. Lucky for me, a friend of mine sent it to me today for a totally unrelated reason and now I have it.
I started writing this blog as a way to force myself to make my thoughts coherent. I hoped to be able to collect and organize some of the best business thinking in a way that would persuade some of you to change your minds about why we work.
When I was in law school and first thinking about these ideas, I briefly considered a career in academia, where I could research and write papers on the subject. But I realized that if I did that, I’d just end up writing for a small group of other academic lawyers who really wouldn’t understand what entrepreneurship means because they would never experience it.
So as I write these posts, I want to avoid the trap of being a mere critic. After all, I’m not an employer. I’m still not even in the arena.
We ought to give a great deal of credit to those people who do take the risk of business ownership. Most of them, in the United States anyway, have no formal business education at all. They’re mostly just regular people who need to feed their families and along the way they figure out they can make life more comfortable by hiring some employees. Some of them are so busy just trying to get their thing going that they wouldn’t have time to read this blog even if they knew it existed. They’re gonna make mistakes and they’re gonna win sometimes. And in some ways, I’m glad they’re not wasting their time reading this blog.
The difference between a mere critic and someone who offers useful ideas is the difference between the man in the arena and those “cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.” It’s the difference between the academes and the landscapers and the outside sales reps and the guy who started a janitorial service so he could get up at 3 AM to clean your office building toilets.
Ultimately, I’m not interested in being a critic. I mean to show the world that there is a better way to do business, and that means I’ll first have to build a better business. I expect to succeed. But if I fail, I’ll fail having dared to try something great.
