One of the most important lessons we learned is that our lives and our businesses will teach us along the way. We don’t need to know everything on day one because the challenges we face on day will likely be ones we are already equipped to handle. As we overcome challenges we get better and better and as the challenges increase in difficulty so too does our ability to tackle them.

We asked members of the community that we admire to share important lessons their business or career has taught them and have shared some of those responses below.

Rafael Huerta | Teacher & Business Owner

In both my professional career and business career, the most important lesson I have learned is to have a growth mindset. Having a growth mindset means to use the failures and successes to continuously improve. When I first started 817 Vintage Hype, I was a math teacher. As a teacher, I constantly had to reflect on my teaching practice in order to grow and give my students the best instruction possible. This led me to receive the Teacher of The Year Award for my school and district. Similarly, as I started my vintage reselling journey I constantly reflected on how I could improve my social media presence and improve my sales. To do this I had to use a growth mindset and that meant I had to put my ego to the side in order to grow my business. At the beginning, to grow my business I started selling vintage clothes by doing pop-ups at events like The DFW Vintage Swap Meet, barber shops, beauty salons, parties, stores, selling out of my house, and even pulling up to tail gate parties at the Dallas Cowboys stadium. The growth mindset attitude led me to open up my store and it the first year of being open it received The Best of Fort Worth Award. Read more>>

Jon-Michael Narvaez | Founder & Design Director

You can’t do it all. As your business starts to scale up, you will need help; there is no way around it. Some artists are business savvy and know how to “play the game,” as my mentor says. You have to let go of your pride and know that although you can doesn’t mean you should. Read more>>

Drew Herndon | Podcast/Content Creator & Business Owner

That you truly can do what you love for a living. Read more>>

Shamineke Green | CEO & Accounting Clerk

The most important lesson my business/ career has taught me was to go hard after your goals and dreams. It may get challenging, it may get tough and sometimes you feel as though you want to give up but don’t! You’ll never get to that success that you’re striving for, if you give up. I consider myself a strong woman and I was raised around women (my mom and sister) who didn’t give up even when times got tough, they still kept pushing and fighting towards their goals. It’s very important to have a plan, in place when you start a business. Some people just jump out there head first without a written plan and that leaves room for a lot of mistakes. I made sure that when I started my business to do research first, because I wanted to know what all came with running a business, all the documents that I needed to run and legit and successful business and what direction I wanted my business to go in. Read more>>