In the words of Theodore Roosevelt:

Do what you can, where you are, with what you have..I saw a show on the Biography channel a few days ago about Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Their names may not be familiar to you, but I’m sure that you have used their marvelous invention countless times: the Google search engine.

While Google is an Internet mammoth now, I was very impressed to learn about the humble origins of this company. After Page and Brin wrote the code for their search engine, they tried to sell it to other established companies, like Yahoo. No one was interested.

They were so committed to their idea that they decided to form their own company. However, they had a small problem. The computers needed to run their program cost a LOT of money. Rather than giving up on their dream, Page and Brin used hard drives from PCs that were lying around and — get this —

built computer cabinets from Legos!

Obviously, their search grew in popularity, they were able to get financing for proper computers and the rest is history.

What can you take away from their story? Do you put off your dreams of working in voice-over because you don’t have the money to buy the top-tier equipment? If you’re already a voice-over professional, do you criticize yourself or are you constantly unhappy because of equipment or facilities that you don’t have? Or do you create recordings with pride and joy using whatever equipment you have, making your plans for the upgrades that you will enjoy as your business expands?

We often use lack of money as an excuse when our own resistance is the cause of our lack of progress. Nobody said that building a career would be easy. Nobody said that it wouldn’t be scary sometimes. Nobody said you would have all of the answers.

If you follow the words of Rough and Ready Teddy (someone who, by the way, knew the value of persistence), you will find that you can accomplish great and wonderful things just by opening your mind to the rich possibilities at hand. By consistently taking action and moving toward your goals using whatever is available to you at the time, your eventual success will be better than you could have dreamed possible!