Small Business Entrepreneur Blog

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I received “The Upside of Fear: How One Man Broke the Cycle of Prison, Poverty, and Addiction ” for reviewing. I knew from the pitch about the book that it was about a convicted criminal that broke out of the Cycle of Prison, poverty and addiction and become a successful entrepreneur.

I soon discovered that the book it’s more like a thriller book, because for the first half it’s actually describing the crimes done by the author for which he has convicted more than 13 years. But this first half does an excellent job at saying that taking control of your life and create the life of your dreams is in your hands, no matter how you might be living today. This is exactly why you can’t let it go until you finish reading – I could hardly wait to see how can you turn from being so low to being a successful entrepreneur.

Reading the book I realized it resonates with so many things I believe and write myself here on the Small Business Entrepreneurship blog. Take for example the fear on entrepreneurship – keeps most people of following their dreams and become what they have envisioned. But what if it’s all in your head and you live your life being in the prison of your own mind? Who is actually in the prison, the fellow that was drinking drugging and committing crimes but decided to take responsibility for the quality and circumstances of his life?

Another thing that I discovered through my series of Entrepreneur Interviews is that waiting for “a better moment” to start a business never puts you in a successful position – don’t think things will somehow happen. Actually doing something good or not so good means that you achieved something, instead of waiting for things to happen. As Weldon says, stop thinking there is something special about you and just wait for things to happen.

Then, there is something else I discovered while talking with people willing to become entrepreneurs and never had the courage to do it: they think that successful entrepreneurs have something special, some ideas and abilities or even luck and this won’t be happening to them. Weldon, now having a dream house in Maui, having run multi-million dollar companies born out of nothing says he is “an average guy living a spectacular life”. And admits that no matter how successful entrepreneurs are it doesn’t mean they don’t have challenges and problems to solve: “the difference between successful people and losers is not the nature of their problems; it’s the nature of their responses to those problems. I came to understand that I had absolute control over how I responded to problems”.

I found amazing the way Weldon changed his perception about life in general while being in prison. I think that actually being in prison worked in his favor – he was at the absolute lowest and the only way out was up or dying. Problem is that most of the people live in the prison made out by society – you get the fake feeling that you are free to do whatever you want but actually forced to act following the society “models of success” – working a 9 to 5 job, buying a house, a second car and spend your life useless to your retirement. And because of the fake “freedom feeling” you don’t put yourself in motion to live the life you dream to have. And as Weldon says about him starting to improve his life “what was amazing was that the only thing that had changed was the way I thought about things”.

I’m not going to tell you about the process Weldon took to change his life. You should read the book because your way of understanding the process might be different from mine and you should discover things that relate better with your inner feelings. I do have the feeling that this might be an unfinished book – I never read a motivational book in a hurry to see how it ends - and I feel like waiting for the sequel.  I will definitively keep an eye on what comes next in Weldon life.