Driven To Build A Successful Business? Read this 5 Minute Story.
Part 1: The problem
Imagine the following situation.
It’s 10 PM.
You turn off your laptop, tired like never before.
What was it you did today? you ask yourself, while slowly realizing that the office’s light is off and everyone in your 10 people business left.
You’ve just spent the day calling potential customers, showing people the demo of your product, keeping your team aligned and managing investor relations.
But you know it’s only to cover the fact that your business isn’t going anywhere. Most clients aren’t buying anymore, and the ones that do require so much manual labour that it’s more like you’re a project company than a product company. You and your team are running around like a chicken with its head cut off.
You think back to four years ago, when you started this business. All hopes and dreams back then.
And today, you’ve got hardly anything to show for it.
On your walk back home, you think about these past couple of years. Did I try hard enough? Did I hire the right people? Should we have grown faster? Am I the one to be doing this? What’s stopping me from growing? Is this even worth it?
You lean against the lamppost on the street, and sign. “I wish I knew…” Wish you knew what went wrong, why that went wrong and how you could possibly fix it now.
Feeling lost and lonely, you push yourself from the lamppost into the nearest bar.
Within no-time, you find yourself on a bar stool with a beer and a whisky. The place smells like dried up beer, the floor in kind of sticky, the lighting is kind of obscure, and the barman is missing his front teeth.
You sign.
What is that you hear…?
A chuckle…?
You turn to your left an see your neighbor chuckling.
Amazed, “You always chuckle when someone’s having a bad time?” you ask.
Your neighbor chuckles again, takes a sip from his drink, and turns his stool to face you.
“Let me guess,” he says. “Clean jeans, shirt with top buttons open, decent sneakers, eye bags larger than I’ve seen them in a long time. You’re either from around the corner at McKinsey or running your own business.”
You’re too tired to think back to whether you’ve met your neighbor before, and too tired to deny his claim.
“Sure, running my own business. Why does that make you chuckle?”
Your neighbor takes the last sip of his beer, subtly lifts his finger to the barman, and then turns back looking at you, grinning.
“And let me guess, you’re in couple of years, failing to move forward, trying whatever you can to bring in the money to support all your team members who have mortgages and kids, but nothing’s really working. You’ve put in the time, money and effort to bring to life the business of your dreams. But now, essentially, you have no idea what to do, when to do it, why you should do it and how to do it. ”
Your head gets heavy while you try to use the remainder of your mental energy to think back to a moment when you’ve met this stranger. But your brain doesn’t help you at this point of the day, so you murmur: “Look, do I know you?”
“No you don’t, but I’ve seen hundreds of people like you. Working your asses off to achieve your dreams, not achieving it not because you’re not smart enough or not working hard enough. No, not because of that, but because you’re doing the wrong things. And it’s such a shame, because you guys all have so much potential, but for some sort of reason you just can’t figure it out.”
You feel your back warming up over this, a feeling up anger creeping up.
“Figure what out?” you hiss, looking away from your neighbor.
“That the level of your success is more in your control than you think,” he stops, for the barman comes in to give your neighbor his drink. He goes on quickly, “It’s more in control than you think, but for some reason or another, you sit around waiting for some magical event to happen.”
You feel an immense urge coming up to defend yourself and your business. Everything in you wants to protest. All of your BS alarms go off. You want to smack your neighbor off of his dreamy throne and back to reality.
My business doesn’t work like that — you think.
But at the same time something in you is triggered.
Even though all of this sounds too good to be true, your neighbor did just hit a bull’s-eye on the target of all of your pain points. First, you’re not building the business of your dreams. And second, and maybe even worse, you have no idea why or what you can do about it.
So you decide to give this stranger the benefit of the doubt.
“That’s all great. But what can be done about that today? What can all those hundreds of people like me do about that situation?”
You hear your neighbor taking a deep breath, and waiting a moment. You turn towards him, and he replies:
“The problem is simple. Your mindset — or the way you think — is what’s keeping you back. For example, you’re obsessed with getting it perfect. You focus on your brilliant ideas rather than the value for others. You’re so optimistic that you ignore all the data indicating you might be wrong.”
Ouch…
“The solution, in the same vein, is simple as well. You just need the right mindset. How you do that is a whole different game. We can discuss that tonight, but you likely won’t be home before midnight.”
Your neighbor stops for a second and looks at you. You know he knows the answer. Still he asks:
“Interested?”
You smile, wave at the barman, and order two more beers.
This is the first in a series on the mindset of successful entrepreneurs, in which I will share the 12 mindset shifts you must make to build a successful startup. My goal for the series is to help more entrepreneurs get it right.
Read part 2 here.
And I’m really curious to hear your feedback! This is kind of an experiment. Normally, these types of articles aren’t being written in story-form. So what do you think? Leave a comment!
Oh, and don’t forget to…
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