Resilience, recovery time, mistakes and denial — how to be a better founder

Every founder journey is long and complex. Many also start with young founders, inexperienced operators and managers, and play out over a number of years where teams are forced to learn new skills under intense pressure while scaling themselves and their business to win.

Mistakes will be made, times will be hard, successes will be wonderful but often fleeting and this will be an emotional journey as much as a technical one. Learning your own limits, blind spots and rabbit holes will be an invaluable investment. The interplay between resilience, recovery time, mistakes and denial will help shape you as a better founder.

Resilience

There’s no doubt that resilience is one of the major traits any founder will need on their startup journey. The ability to endure long periods of discomfort or pain, fighting against the odds, and succeed in getting through to the other side.

In fact, it’s so important, it’s one of the key traits we screen for at Entrepreneur First when we assess candidates for their ability to be successful entrepreneurs. We often look for evidence of resilience in their history and we ask them to tell us a story about a time when they displayed enormous resilience (testing story telling too — clever right ;-).

However, resilience will only work as a strategy when there is actually an end to the state you’re enduring. This is why you’ve got to be super careful that you’re not in denial.

Denial

Resilience when coupled with denial will slowly erode and destroy your startup. If you’re in denial about something you can draw on your resilience and your team to keep fighting the good fight, but there will be no end to it.

Denial can be large or small, fundamental or inconsequential — but when its present and sucking energy from you and the team, it will be a slow downward spiral.

There will be some times when denial will amount to a fundamental question — will this startup work? Is there actually a market for this? Do customers actually want these things? Denial in these cases is often because you don’t even ask the questions, or if you do, you’re not really interested in the answers. Still too often startups work in isolation from customers, don’t test the product in real or valuable use cases, and don’t listen to the answers they don’t want to hear.

By actively trying to prove that your inbound assumptions are wrong, you can fight the risk of fundamental denial, and keep an open mind to discovering the secrets that will unlock your success.

Denial can also be more subtle and subversive. Not listening to your team, ignoring the KPIs and metrics that are shedding light on what’s actually happening, letting a good narrative and easy answer get in the way of facts, relying too closely on feedback from some individuals while ignoring or downplaying feedback from others, or just refusing to change your mind.

These things will often get worse the longer they go on for, lead to a cascading set of issues as the original problem is not uncovered, and get harder to solve. And ultimately, they will force themselves to the surface no matter how much you deny them. Far better to face them, even late, and get on with recovering.

Recovery time

Which brings me to recovery time. The reason we admire world class athletes, is not just their extraordinary endurance and resilience in the pursuit of excellence, but it’s also their recovery time. The measure of true fitness at that level is the ability to go from extreme exertion, recover more rapidly than a normal person, and have the capacity to go again more quickly.

Your practice as a founder is to understand and improve your own recovery time and that of your team. Holidays, weekends, meditation, exercise, hikes, water, music, art, nature — whatever works for you — it’s worth figuring it out. Staggering from one exertion to another without an improved recovery time will at best slow you down, and at worse kill you off.

Mistakes

And finally mistakes. Recovery time is not just about huge exertions, it’s about your ability to de-escalate, get perspective, course correct and admit error as quickly as possible. Your ego, fatigue, stubbornness and saving face will all get in the way of this. You will always make mistakes, stop being surprised that you do — the only thing you can do is get better at recognising them, deal with them immediately and improve your recovery time.

I observed a super experienced founder working with her co-founder recently across a range of important and emotionally charged issues as their organisation undergoes yet another evolution at a large scale.

Late in the day, she had asked over email clarification and agreement on a relatively minor but politically sensitive point that was important to her and the health of the organisation. She received back a terse, pointed and grumpy note from her co-founder — not what she was expecting, and it left her feeling upset and uncomfortable — one of those issues that will keep nagging at you.

By chance, I saw her again the next day. I asked what she’d done in the end. Nothing she said. She went home, did some exercise, spent time with her family and went to sleep. By the next morning she was ready to deal with it without the emotional charge.

But even better, first thing that morning, she’d received a follow up note from her co-founder. He’d apologised, recognised his reaction, offered agreement, or actually an alternative way forward that was even better, and the issue was resolved.

I can’t tell you how impressed I was with even this small interaction. She hadn’t escalated, resisted the impulse to reply immediately, instead focused on her own recovery time. This has given him the chance to reflect, recover, take action and move on.

For me, that was a minor display of true mastery. Your startup journey will be made up of a few big decisions and hundreds of small ones. Being practiced in both will make your progress faster. Good luck!