Japman Bajaj

Every year, I make a pact at play­off time — pro­vid­ing, of course, that the Sens make it — that I will wear a piece of Ottawa Sen­a­tors cloth­ing each and every day that the Sen­a­tors remain in the play­offs. My car is con­sis­tently dec­o­rated with flags, and I wear my pas­sion on my sleeve when it comes to the Senators.

But this past week sure has been a tough week as a Sens fan! We win game 1 of this first round series, and then get beat down 3 times in a row to go down 3–1 in the series.

On Wednes­day, I wore my Sens jer­sey to a meet­ing, and one of the senior exec­u­tives of the com­pany I was vis­it­ing com­mented on my wear­ing a Sens jer­sey, even though we had just been spanked 7–4 the night before. I told him “just because things don’t look so good, it doesn’t mean you give up.”

It hap­pens to the best of us. We’ll go weeks or even months at a time liv­ing on cloud 9, and all of a sud­den, one day, we’ll wake up and find our­self doubt­ing our pas­sions, or doubt­ing our abil­i­ties. Those are some of the worst days for an entre­pre­neur. It’s never a good day when you doubt your­self, your abil­i­ties, or your discipline.

But it’s impor­tant to keep the con­vic­tion. To put it in hockey terms, it’s impor­tant to “leave it all on the ice”. Coin­ci­den­tally, that’s exactly what the Sens did tonight. I just fin­ished watch­ing the 6-period marathon, and there def­i­nitely were times where I’ll admit that I thought we were done tonight.

But that’s why it’s the guys on the ice who get it done. Some­times, even your clos­est friends and sup­port­ers will doubt your abil­i­ties. But when it comes down to per­form­ing, you have to have full belief in your­self and your choices and your sit­u­a­tion. Even when things look down, don’t give up on your­self. There’s a whole world of peo­ple out there who have the option of giv­ing up on you. As an entre­pre­neur, you do NOT have that option. You must never give up on yourself.

Go Sens Go! An inspi­ra­tion for the com­mu­nity, and now, an inspi­ra­tion for my entre­pre­neur­ial initiatives!