This was a good read, something that everyone -- every business person, entrepreneur, and ordinary Joe -- should hear or read in some form or another sometimes.

This was a good read, something that everyone -- every business person, entrepreneur, and ordinary Joe -- should hear or read in some form or another sometimes. So, what I'm about to say isn't directed at what he wrote, but at a somewhat larger attitude. To over 90% of business owners, hearing someone describe "The Struggle" with problems like, "my venture capitalist said we'd have trouble raising funds this year" is ... I'm not honestly sure how to describe it. Some mixture of hilarity and deep, wretched, hopeless sadness. A tremendous number of business owners don't have access to capital to grow their business, beyond what they can accumulate in credit and savings. Nor do many of them have a soft landing if their business falters; they rely on their business, every month, to make a living wage. They don't start worrying when Europe has a crisis, they start worrying when the local gas prices go up 20 cents overnight because they've seen first-hand what it does to their business. They don't just have to deal with losing a loyal customer over the phone or email, they have to deal with an irate customer in person. How many startup founders do you think can handle that with grace and dignity? One of my favorite business clients is a strong mother of 2 who runs a small boutique shop. Her industry has been hard hit by the economy. I was there working on her equipment one day when the last customer left and she spontaneously broke down in tears because it had been a tough day, a tough week, a tough and relentless Summer. She couldn't solve her business's problems by getting in front of a bunch of employees and giving them a pep talk; she had to solve it by getting up the next morning and sticking with it even when it looked hopeless. Don't put it all on your shoulders? If you're a small business owner, what the hell else are you going to do? Nobody else is going to figure out where the next invoice is coming from. Nobody else is going to say, "That was my fault, not yours." You're responsible for all of it. Every single aspect. Funding? I've never -- not once -- had anyone believe in me or my business enough to offer me money to make it bigger. Not even credit. Not even a loan. At some point you accept that this actually is your fault, that people have really good reasons for not wanting to support your business, despite the fact that you have built it from absolutely nothing, despite somehow managing to attract one or two really bright people, despite having hundreds of customers who love you to the extent that you no longer spend any money on marketing because your customers do a better job of telling other people about you than any marketing can. But you keep going anyway. Nothing in that piece was wrong, and I'm certainly not dismissing the challenges that CEOs of well-funded companies face. But, I sure wish that more people had more respect for small businesses, because if you really want to know how to handle The Struggle, go talk to a small business owner. Regarding the checkers/chess game reference, there's an even better game to reference. It's the oldest continuously-played board game in the world, it was originally developed as a tool for teaching business, it takes minutes to learn and I think nobody has ever mastered it, it's a great way to develop intuition about when to be aggressive and when to be defensive, and it has a perfect balance of tactics and strategy: it's called Go. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(game)