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A startup, like any risky endeavor, requires the persistence of a punch-me doll. As long as a Founder is a principal in the company, they will always be getting whacked, slapped, punched, and mocked for everything that goes wrong. No matter the preparation, it always comes out of the blue and occurs with seemingly no respite.
When building a company for so many things will grind you down and beat you up, that hard work by itself won’t have a chance. A startup will dispense with cold efficiency any effort abundant in hard work but lacking in passion. There will be so many pitfalls, setbacks, and missteps that you will lose the will to work hard.
Passion gives you hope when there is seemingly none and pushes you to work hard until there’s “nothing left in the uniform.” On the other hand, hard work without passion is an affront to intelligence and will die a quick death.
For this reason, a Founder has to have passion but not in the way one might think. Yes, there is a grand dream to change the world and a vision of how things should be and reap the rewards that follow. But the kind of passion that pushes a founder every day is very different.
The loving-what-you-do, or more importantly stick-to-it-iveness, is hard to describe but unmistakable to spot. It is the magical place where the competence in the craft, curiosity for the unknown, and the joy for the work come together to create spectacular results. Some experts might even call it Flow.
What follows are three hard-learned lessons that helped me get through my journey. Not sure if it works for everyone, but it did for me. Shared here so that they don’t disappear in the valleys of my mind.
The Interruption is the Flow
A good copywriter can do at most an hour of actual writing, David Ogilvy once said. The same is true for a Founder. If your core competency is writing software, you’ll be lucky on most days if you get in an hour of solid code writing. So many things are falling apart the constant fire-fighting will sap you of all your creative juices.
Remember when everyone warned of the long hours? Well, this is why. You have to do what you’re good at, and you also have to do all that needs to get done. There are no black boxes that are someone else’s problem. They are all your problems.
Instead of fighting the interruption, embrace it. The firefight is the flow.
This is a fundamental mindset change that is the hardest to do, especially for a technical founder. Trained and rewarded for specialization, the startup now consumes all of her time and not for stuff she’d like to do, but if she didn’t do it herself, it would not get done.
Be OK with that.
Passion vs. Motivation
So many things will get you down that no amount of love for the dream will motivate you. Distinguish between the passion for “why” and the motivation it takes to do the work. Doing this will allow you to be flexible in finding different sources of inspiration.
The source can be anything that helps you get past the day-to-day block-and-tackle. You can binge-watch Ted Lasso reruns or be your own Ted Lasso. Take up Call of Duty, read biographies, working out, or hanging out with family. It can be your innate competitiveness or the fear of failure. Acknowledge it and harness it to drive you towards your passion.
Whatever your coping mechanism is, make sure it serves the goal of getting you pumped up, not suck you into its vortex of time.
Don’t Forget Your Support System
There will be lines you said you’d cross, things you never thought you’d do to get the job done, to win the customer. And you’ll do them without a thought. Having a personal board of directors, be it a parent, a spouse, an uncle, former co-workers, and best friends, will ensure that you don’t lose yourself when you cross those lines.
Finally, Not Just Founders
The need for passion in what we do is not just peculiar to founders—everyone who gives themselves to an all-consuming cause show such devotion. Startups and Founders are what I know and understand, and about them, I write.