An entrepreneur always forgets

November 10, 2009 | (No Comments)

Starting up a company is a lot different than working for somebody else for a living. When you’re in the business of “that hasn’t been done before”, there are a lot of mistakes to make. And in some senses, growing a start-up is all about learning how your business will work, by figuring out what won’t work. The hard way. By screwing it up the first time.

And that’s why a short memory and a long time-horizon is what makes an entrepreneur.

A business that is already up and running has standard procedures for dealing with the world. A way to service customers, and a means to acquire new ones. A system for purchasing goods, and back-ups in case one falls through. A way to finance the business, and a plan to make returns for its shareholders.

Through time and prudence, established companies have found their way to a set of policies, plans, procedures and programs that make its businesses work well.

For a start-up, just the opposite is true. Nothing is determined, nothing is time-tested, nothing has been molded by trial and error into a workable trade-off.

The result is pain. Lots of it. In repeated, persistent, capricious doses.

There’s the marketing hire who gets away. The customer that signs up and then has a change of heart. The contact you’ve been buttering up for months at your potentially biggest game-changing partner who gets canned the week before the final meeting. The vaporware that the 800-pound gorilla announces to a gullible press that sucks the air out of your momentum and buzz. The thousand of ways that things can go wrong, big and small (usually both), that distract, depress, and discourage the mere mortal at the heart of the entrepreneurial venture.

I know they say that success has a thousand fathers and failure is an orphan; but then whoever is siring the little bastard is one promiscuous fella, because start-ups do nothing but create failure after failure.

Succeeding at a start-up is not, then, about being prescient enough, smart enough, and experienced enough to never make mistakes, but rather it is about learning why it went wrong — both the symptom and the ultimate cause — and rebuilding your business to be stronger in light of it. And the faster you make your mistakes, the quicker you’ll take your lessons from them. That’s how you learn.
So an important part of being an entrepreneur is forgetting.

They say that women’s bodies produce a drug to forget the pain of pregnancy after they give birth, and maybe the entrepreneur’s experience parrots that.

There are so many painful experiences in the course of a start-up’s life that it’s a wonder anybody voluntarily does it at all. The odds are bad, the pay is atrocious, the chances for advancement dubious, and the world is dead-set against you when it isn’t ignoring you.

A typical person on a typical day would consider any one of these indignities worthy of surrender.

And that’s why a short memory — forgetting yesterday’s pain while remembering the lesson that came with it — is what makes for a successful entrepreneur. Because dwelling on the embarrassments, humiliations, and failures that happened before today’s sunrise will do nothing to make you more successful by today’s sunset.

Yep, a start-up is all about let-down and heartbreaks. And getting to success requires a mind that always forgets.