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Small Business Awards: Chris Hurn's acceptance speech
I want to say thanks to Eunice and Veronica and whoever else is on this mysterious panel.
I appreciate this. This is actually my 3rd time in 6 years of getting this award. I do
remember that the first time was 2006 and it was not this nice of a function. In 2010
we had a nice luncheon function and you were right maybe a third of this room was actually
full. Back then I gave a speech I thought was kind of funny. You have all heard of Jeff Foxworthy's "you might be an entrepreneur
if." Actually even the esthetics were better because we tried to record that back then
and share it with people and we just didn't get good audio. Before I share that, just
a couple of comments that my kids actually suggested I share with you today. I have a
9 and 11 year old. I want to actually share this award and humbly thank my staff because
quite frankly this is not necessarily my award; it is really that table over there. That's
only about half of our staff. We are like a family. As Ed was saying when you're an
entrepreneur if you can build a company of your own image and create the culture, it
is a very profound experience. When you have a family of people that you care for and that
you work hard with and hopefully don't have a lot of drama with and all the politics and
all the other stuff that goes with the big businesses, it is a lot of fun. By some accounts
you probably spend more time with those you work with then you do with your loved ones
at home, during the waking hours at least. My contention is that you better make sure
you like the people you work with and I do and I thank all of you guys for your help.
This is really your award, not so much mine. I would just like to say that.
Let me switch gears for just a second because I know I don't have a whole lot of time but
I will tell you a funny story. My kids actually and don't be alarmed Brooke that I'm not going
to read pages and pages of stuff. I got asked to come back to my rural high school in downstate
Illinois back in February and they wanted me to come and talk. I actually think they
were sort of testing me out before they might ask me to do a commencement speech. It was
actually kind of smart on their behalf to make sure I don't screw something up with
a microphone in front of me. I thought about this a lot and what I finally ended up deciding
was that I was going to act out as if I was giving advice to my 17 year old self. Unfortunately
they didn't tell me I was going to be speaking to the freshman and sophomores and then I
was going to be speaking to the juniors and seniors that I thought I was addressing. It
was a little heavy for the freshman and sophomores. I'm not going to go over all of the lessons,
ironically enough these are a couple things I'm working on my next book in. I think some
of the reason I got this award is I came out with a book in October called the Entrepreneur's
Secret to Creating Wealth. Hopefully some of you in this room have gotten it, if not
you can go to Amazon and get it. These are some of the things. I'm just going to share
three of the quick lessons that I told them. The first one is, you have all heard this
before but it is profound that when your work with entrepreneurs daily like we do that you
try and understand where they are coming from. So the first thing I would say and what I
told these kids is a reflection on a lot of the folks in this room is if you are going
to dream you try and dream big and take risks. We have all heard those saying those adages
those clichés. But I want to tell you a little bit about the story of Icarus and his father
Daedalus. You guys all know him? Well if you don't know it, it's ok I don't want to humiliate
you but it's a story where he built wings for his son to fly. They had been imprisoned
and he warned him not to fly too high because the sun would melt the wax that kept his wings
together and then he could die. This is a warning fundamentally to hubris. That's the
moral of the story and what we are taught a lot of the times in our culture. We are
trying to protect our young. Well we have forgotten that there is another part to this
story that I was reminded of in a recent business book. Which is the other warning that Daedalus
gave his son is that of flying too low. He warned if he flew too low that the waves and
that was somewhere by Greece. It has a lot of water around Greece. Nick will tell you
about it. I think it has more coastline than any country in the world. Anyways if you fly
too low the water would lap up onto the waves and it would weigh him down and again he would
crash and die. But we incorrectly warn against flying too high when we don't realize the
repercussions of not warning of flying too low. I feel that's something entrepreneurs
live on a daily basis. I have often referred to this as crab in the bucket disease. If
you're a crab trying to escape the other crabs in the bucket and all the other crabs are
going to try and pull you back down. But the job is to escape, entrepreneurship is about
freedom. Not settling for flying too low this I think is a fundamental piece of doubting
your fears and not doubting your dreams.
That was one of the things I talked to these students about obviously it was a little more
put together than what I'm doing in front of you because I am trying to abbreviate this
because of the amount of time I have got. I thought that was pretty important and I
think it is an important lesson that we focus so much on hubris and sometimes we forget
that it is okay to aim high and fail because you are going to get a lot further in life.
With that I am not going to share the other ones just yet, you are going to have to read
the book in the next couple of years. I appreciate this again thank you so much and guys I am
going to bring this over to your table. Thank you so much.