We’ve been taught that if we just persevere and persist, we will ultimately win.

Like the man who is told there is a million dollars behind a thick brick wall, and he is given a small chisel to get to it. His hands bleed and he persists day and night, breaking a way through the wall.

He seldom sleeps, never quits, works as hard as he can, denies himself rest and entertainment. He persists until finally, after months of backbreaking work, he gets through the wall, only to find that he was lied to – there is no money there.

Persistence Works When

Before you start on a mammoth task, make sure there is money behind the wall. Do your due diligence.

But when you are convinced that you’re on the right track, that your goal is legitimate, and that it’s up to you to achieve it, persistence is the way to get there.

It’s not about intelligence or who you know or some silly college degree – the hallmark of champions is persistence. The only time it doesn’t work is when the goal is wrong or you quit.

Persistence separates the men from the boys...

We hear it time and again; the qualities of a successful startup business leader or successful entrepreneur: “risk taker” – “not averse to risk” – “takes chances” – “will take a gamble in hopes of winning” – “not fearful of uncertainty”, etc. – so much so - that it is ingrained into our thinking.  Risk-taking is inherently what it takes to succeed when starting one’s own business.  Or is it?  A new perspective plays out several examples of successful business billionaire-entrepreneurs who simply buck that trend with clear markers to the contrary.

Malcolm Gladwell is nearly always a provocative if not a fascinating read.  After studying a characteristically stimulating recent piece of his in the January 18, 2010 New Yorker titled “The Sure Thing” I learned something new about successful business people, mainly entrepreneurs.

The facts bear out in Gladwell’s research and research cited by other sources whereby countless examples of entrepreneurs are better at calculating the downside and avoiding risk than they are at...

You’ve seen the eye-popping statistics: Facebook now has more than 350 million active users. If it were a country, it would be the third most-populous on earth, behind only China and India. TechCrunch predicts that “by this summer (2010) well over half of all Internet users will likely visit Facebook each month.” It’s now the second most-visited site on the web, behind only Google.

Given that level of popularity and traffic, it’s no wonder that marketers have embraced Facebook in a big way. What’s curious, however, is that of the top 50 brands on Facebook according to Slate magazine, not one is a b2b vendor. Not even close. And as Mark Schaefer has noted, b2b Facebook success stories are notoriously hard to come by (he found one).

With a mammoth audience and the acceptance, even embrace, of brands there, why is Facebook success so elusive for b2b marketers? It isn’t demographics. Granted, the potential pool of customers for most b2b companies is minute compared to that for major consumer brands, but given the sheer size and ubiquity of Facebook, there are still a lot of b2b buyers using it.

The challenge rather lies in the way Facebook fan pages are used...

This past weekend I took my nine-year-old son to the local Elks Lodge to see Chaotic Wrestling – the local independent professional wrestling promoter. I found out about the matches through the local newspaper (and I have said before, I still read them), so they did a nice job with PR – front page story and all. My son had a great time. It was kept family clean, and so when he said he wanted to go again, I thought that was fine. And that is where the marketing lesson in this starts.

So the first suggestion is to use a service like Eventbright for tickets. The only way for me to buy advanced tickets was to call some guy whose name and number was listed in the paper (I feel sorry for him for the amount of calls he probably got). Since I was planning this day-of the event, I figured there was no way I would get him, so we just showed up early. We got tickets, but I am sure there were others who did not since the Elks only seats about 300 and the place was packed.

The next opportunity for Chaotic to improve their business success came at the point of purchase for the tickets, videos and t-shirts. They only took cash...