When I was a child in midwestern Colorado, people used figures of speech to make light of someone or to clarify a point. Whenever I did something right, they might tell me, “Even a blind squirrel can find an acorn in the forest now and then.” I realized today that they probably never actually crawled around on the forest floor before.
If you have ever sat down on the forest floor around trees that have acorns in them, you will notice that finding an acorn is not that hard at all.
In fact, a blind squirrel might not have that much trouble. That is, unless all the other squirrels beat him to it.
This got me thinking about my predicament right now. Everyone says that my target ideal customer is hard to find and that there is a lot of competition. They say that the one or two I found were just lucky. A blind squirrel could do that. But the reality is that these people are blind to themselves: ideal customers are actually everywhere.
Getting the ideal customer is not that hard at all. In fact, so far, the experience has been just like that forest floor. Acorns everywhere. The reality is that a blind squirrel would thrive in a forest full of acorns.
I have been listening to the wrong voices. The people telling me it is hard have not looked closely at what is actually there. They are repeating what they have heard, not what they have seen. They are speaking from fear, not from experience.
“The reality is that a blind squirrel would thrive in a forest full of acorns.”
So I think I will just ignore these blind men and keep harvesting as much as I can. The work is not to find the acorns. The work is to stop listening to people who say they are not there.
