How much time will you commit to success?
My entrepreneurial instincts were there from the age of six or seven — getting myself not just a paper round but three or four other kids to help me complete my paper round, so I could take on more paper rounds! I didn’t fully embrace a business career until after my time playing football. It started with work in an electrical wholesalers. Next came a sales position and a management programme in a big corporation.
My true entrepreneurialism wouldn’t fully realise itself until I was about 27, when I went into business with my brother. Since that time, I haven’t stopped. I’ve got seven startups under my belt so far and I don’t plan on settling there. There’s a whole lot more I want to do. 17 years to get to where I am today and decades more still to put in, all being well.
That’s a considerable amount of time to dedicate to an idea of success. But it’s by no means special. In fact, it’s the norm.
My question is, are you willing to commit to the same in order to achieve your dreams? Or is a potential lifetime too big of an ask? Will you buckle under the weight of frustration of getting nowhere after a couple of years? Will failing with your first startup put you off? Have you got the strength to put in the hours every day, when there are a million other things you could be doing with your time?
Just as professional athletes are ready to dedicate decades to their game, so must entrepreneurs.
Here are my top tips for making a commitment to entrepreneurial success:
Define what success means to you
Professional athletes have pretty clear standards of success. Games, championships, medals, trophies and titles are easily measurable. You either win them or you don’t. The money, the sponsorships and the deals may be appealing but the win is their true definition of success.
As an entrepreneur, what success means is down to you. It’s incredibly personal. Sure, there are some industry awards knocking about but success in this world comes down to delivering value to customers and them rewarding you with sales that generate profit and, ideally, growth. What value you can provide, who your customers are, your vision of how much you want to grow and what you’ll do with your profit is up to you.
Take some serious time to build your vision.
Find and embrace your reason to succeed
You may have the dream clear in mind but have you got a good enough reason to keep chasing it? A strong enough driver to keep you executing during the lonely times when the results are slow coming?
Everyone has dreams. Everyone can fantasise about what they’d do with a million dollars or how they’d run their mega corporation. Not everyone has got their reasons clear. Not everyone’s reason is powerful enough to keep them going through the years before the million dollars appears in their bank account or the business has gone global.
Your reasons can be internal (desire for freedom, financial independence, excitement), external (the wish for material gain and public status), or a mix.
Whatever they are, find them and continually test whether they’re strong enough to keep going through the crap.
Understand from the start how long takes to be successful
This is a big mindset issue. Overnight success is a myth that won’t die. Success can happen relatively fast, compared to some others, but trust me when I say there has been serious work gone into making that success happen as quickly as it did. Generally speaking, we’re talking years to build up a respectable and profitable business operation.
That’s just the wider view. You also need to appreciate how much time it will take within those years. The months, the weeks, the days and the hours. Professional athletes live and breath their sport 24/7. 365. This needs to be the same for you as an entrepreneur.
Now, I don’t mean working 24 hours a day. That’s stupid. What I mean is that your entrepreneurial goals and personal life must shape your whole day and what you do in it; the quality of food you eat, the sleep you get, the work you do and the fun you have must all be high and moving you forward to the bigger dream. That’s a big part of being EntrepreneurFit.
Visualise success constantly — especially on the bad days
Athletes visualise constantly. Sport psychology is a big industry and an important one. Mindset can make or break champions. That’s why they paint vivid pictures in their mind about the whole performance. They go deep into imagining their shots, the feel of their body, what their mind will feel like, even their time on the podium after they’ve won. This does two things - it helps their performance under pressure and keeps them motivated when training is hard and desire is low.
You need to do the same. Keep painting that picture of success in your head. It may change slightly over time but you should always work on its detail and strength of emotion.
Expand its scope. We all start with the big visions — the venture capital win, the IPO, the nice house, the beaches — but it pays to visualise the smaller wins more. They’ll lead to the big ones. Visualise the best day ahead, the best next week, the fantastic sales presentation and executing your content strategy.
Show up and keep faith in the effect of compound interest
Finally, have faith in the compound interest of your efforts. This is something I’m going to be referring to a lot because I love it and it works.
Even the best of us would struggle to be hyped up and super committed the whole time it takes to make a startup successful. Even the strongest reasons in the world can waiver in the face of a miserable Monday morning when things have stalled or are going bad.
At times like this, it’s important to remember that even the smallest wins will move you forward. A little bit of contribution, made daily, will accumulate into something much bigger. So long as you show up and do the work, regardless of how you’re feeling, the reward will come. It just may not come the next day.
Stay strong.
