Are you an entrepreneur or thinking about becoming one?
Here is the dark truth of every successful entrepreneurship that very few talk about...
You are going to FAIL even if your business succeeds (in terms of adding value to its customers and also financially).
Morgan Housel, the author of Psychology of Money, put it well:
"There’s a good friend of mine named Brent Beshore who says, “Every successful business is a loosely functioning disaster.”
Every single successful business in the world, that’s as good as you can get.
That’s the highest peak... a loosely functioning disaster.
Every business is just a mix of personalities and emotions and imperfect information, and you’re just trying to hold the thing together and do the best that you can. And you really see that when you’re on the inside of any company that exists in world. That’s always apparent, for me, just as an outside investor, looking at any company or on the inside as well."
That's what's going to happen to your passionate idea and business!
Many entrepreneurs I chat with have been employees in the past & have been frustrated about not being able to get stuff done and test good ideas in production!
Or, at some point in their career, they had a manager that they lost respect for & sometimes that was a contributing factor for them jumping into entrepreneurship in the first place.
But, the irony is that IF they are successful, their own business ends up creating the same issues for their employees. As Ernest Cline wrote,
"Two-Face was right. You either die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain!".
If you aspire to prove Morgan Housel wrong and a build business where your employees can tap dance to work, I'd love to work with you. Not that there won't be any fires to fight - but, the feeling the next day would be good, like the burn after lifting weights.
I'm passionate about building a new class of entrepreneurs who
🧠 are "systems" aware vs purely reductionistic
💸 are in it to solve for something vs motivated by money
🏭 are not just working IN the business but also working ON the business
🌀 are in it to become a better version of themselves vs playing status games (Look how many people I got working for me)
The premature death of so many businesses is caused because of rapid growth. Those businesses may or may not change hands (entrepreneur's exit), but they end up chasing growth, hire too many people & the pace of innovation deteriorates over time. From there, it is usually a slow & painful march to irrelevance/death.
We are entering the era where many multi-billion dollar businesses are going to built and run by a handful of people (#AI optional 😉)… But, if those entrepreneurs repeat the same mistakes of the mainstream, they are doomed to fail.
Tremendous explosion in innovation and productivity in the 21st century will be unleashed not just by improvements in technology, but more importantly by improvements in psychology!
Research about effective organization has made a lot of progress in the past few decades. But, mainstream is still stuck with industrial era paradigms. I will teach you how to detect/prevent entropy in your business so that you don't lose your pace of innovation over time .
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If and when you are successful as an entrepreneur, my hope is that you'll end up with lots of free time and only a few decisions to make in any given year!
Please share this post with every aspiring entrepreneur you know 🙏
For now, I’ll leave with you some words of wisdom about entrepreneurship - from Steve Jobs and Peter Thiel 👇🏾