A successful business trainer and I were talking one day about how people give up their goal of working at home before they get started. “The Martians get them,” he said. He calls the dream stealers Martians, but I like to think of them as lemmings.

Lemmings are those creatures that follow everyone else even if its off  a cliff and to their deaths. I have found that in some cases, people are like lemmings and that they want the people around them to be lemmings too. They don’t want others to reach for the stars and break away from the pack particularly to be successful. You see it all the time when friends and family sabotage dieting efforts (they don’t want you to be thinner or prettier than them). As long as the lemmings keep everyone in the pack, they can blame their circumstance on anything but their own failure to take action.

When you break away, strive to do and be more, the pack will try to rein you in so they don’t look mediocre. Their attempts to hold people back are often disguised as concern,

“I hope you aren’t setting yourself up for disappointment.”

“I hope you know what you are doing.”

“I heard those things never work.”

Other times they might just try to beat you down by making fun of you or saying that you aren’t smart enough.

“No one is going to buy from you.”

“I can’t believe you fell for that.”

“That’ll never work.”

The sad part is that friends and family, the people who should be the most supportive, are often the first ones to question, tease and even discourage you.

But, if you really want to succeed in working at home, you need to hold firm to your dream. Do you think people thought stay-at-home mom Mrs. Fields was crazy to think she could open a store selling her chocolate chip cookies? Do you think people thought Mary Kay Ashe was nuts to think she could support her family selling her cosmetics from her kitchen table? Do you think people thought J.K. Rowling was wasting her time and not being a good mother (they were extremely poor) sitting in that cafe day after day writing about Harry Potter?

Everybody starts at the bottom with only a dream. Mrs. Fields did. Mary Kay did. JK Rowling did. I did. None of us let the lemmings in our world (and those sometimes lurking in our psyche) hold us back. So don’t be a lemming. Move away from the cliff and forge your own path!