Pangs of Rural Entrepreneurship

Written By: Oz Girl, Grit Blogger

Many of us dream of a home business where we can sit at our computer in our pajamas and slippers telecommuting with our job or even better, growing our own home business. Self-satisfaction is high on the list of goals when starting a home business. Not dealing with the self-indulgent, loud and smug co-worker in the cube next to me is the added bonus. Not dealing with the co-worker or manager conflicts inherent in a desk job motivates me to make a go of this home business thing.

Marketing ourselves can be the most difficult part of a home business. We all realize this fact, yet it can be brought home to us with a vicious backlash that can send us crawling to the “help wanted” ads, bowing our heads in defeat as we search for a new “cube” job.

Sure, the rejection can be tough. Let it kick us down for a short while, say a few hours perhaps … ok, maybe a few days. But then we need to lift ourselves off the couch, turn off Rachel Ray and clean the cookie crumbs off the coffee table … resolve that our ideas are GOOD, that they have merit, and we just need to do a little more research, and put a little more time into our dream. You know, the whole “practice makes perfect” thingamajig.

Rural isolation can make a home business even more difficult. Even though we are grateful to be minus the conflicts of a corporate job, we now have only internet friends. And we are thankful for these new friends that we meet through blogging or Facebook or Twitter (social websites must be the nemesis of self-sustainability – but I digress, that’s another blog topic someday). Yet face-to-face social events have now become the exception so that even a self-confirmed hermit such as myself begins to long for a night of martinis and laughter with the girls, enough to sate me for several more months of hermit-hood.

Mary Pickford said it best. “This thing that we call ‘failure’ is not the falling down but the staying down.” And then there’s Washington Irving’s well-known quote, “Little minds are tamed and subdued by misfortunes; but great minds rise above them.”

There’s many more philosophical quotes to help me rise above it all, I’m sure, but I’ll try to remember these two and poke my nose high in the air. And maybe go have that martini with the girls. Soon.