The Hard Part of the Start
“Assume that every project you attempt will take more time, money, energy, effort, and people than you can imagine. Multiply every expectation by 10, and you will probably be safe. And if doesn’t take 10 times more than anticipated, great. It is better to be pleasantly surprised than greatly disappointed.” — Grant Cardone, the 10X Rule
Entrepreneurship is hard. It will be about 10 times harder than what you think. There is a lot of uncertainty, and hours of paralysed-by-fear induced procrastination. You will question yourself and what you are good at. At times you will be overwhelmed, not knowing where to start, and other times you will have too much to do. That is one of the reasons why 80% of businesses fail within the first three years.
Somehow we have received an over-romantic idea of Entrepreneurship. Tim Ferris tells us that we only need to work 4 hours a week. What he doesn’t tell us is that he put four years of 16 hour days into his company, before he automated a large part of the company and started travelling (leaving his business to its own devices).
This is a message we all want to believe, we all want an easy path to success. Unfortunately, the only way to become successful is to put in the hard work. People don’t talk about how much work it really takes before you can automate to a 4 hour work week. No successful business starts off with just 4 work hours a week. There is no such thing as an overnight success, because if you analyse any success you will see that it was years and hard work in the making.
It is true that once your business is running and profitable, you can start automating the business. You can build your business to thrive on its own and not be dependent on you. This can be done by putting the right processes and systems in place and working ON the businesses and not IN it. This generally takes years of blood, sweat and tears, and most companies don’t get it right.
So how do you improve your probability of success? You do 10 times more. You take action.
An ounce of action is worth a ton of theory” — Ralph Waldo Emerson, Writer and Poet
The hard part is consistent focus with nobody to hold you accountable. Try not to get distracted by working on too many projects. Habits and discipline become your allies. Grant Cardone, the author of the 10X Rule: The Only Difference between Success and Failure says that starting a business requires 10 times more effort than we think. Effort is action. Most people are willing to put x effort into their business. They have planned and prepared mentally for x effort. Most people aren’t prepared for the 10x the effort that it will take to be successful. Imagine something being 10 times harder than you thought and still trudging ahead. That is what it takes to be an Entrepreneur. It is not romantic, it is hard. It’s the people who put 10x more effort into their business that are more likely to make it.
The scary part of entrepreneurship is that hard work is not enough, you need to have made good assumptions about your business model as well. Assumptions are the foundation of business. Many companies that have failed were doomed by flawed assumptions made at the start. Action, effort and good business principles go hand in hand. You must constantly test your assumptions and either validate or disprove them, to ensure that you are taking the right action. This is hard because we believe that assumptions are the truth, as we make assumptions to fill in the missing parts of the story.
Great tools to test business assumptions are the Lean Methodology and Business Model Canvas.
Being an entrepreneur is hard. Harder than you think. Preparing yourself mentally to do the work, take action, test your assumptions and just trudging ahead will increase your likelihood of being very successful.
