Realities

I tore my Achilles tendon this past Wednesday. I was playing basketball in a men’s league in my town and it popped.

I tore the other Achilles a few years back, so I knew exactly what happened when it happened. I hobbled to the bench, put on my jacket, and went straight home. Then, I started the process — schedule an initial doctor visit, pick an ideal surgery date, order crutches / a foot pillow / the thing that helps you shower with a cast on from Amazon. Finally, I got a new pair of Nike’s that’ll be my inspiration for walking again — goal is to put them on by April.

I’d certainly rather not have torn my Achilles, but I’m not surprised or even particularly upset.

I had an old trainer in high school who was a physical therapist and he’d always laugh about new patients who came in furious about an injury they suffered playing sports. “If you play sports seriously, you’ll get hurt,” he’d say in his harsh Russian accent. “Being surprised when you get hurt is like being surprised when winter comes each year. Rehabbing and preventing injuries are as much a part of basketball as free throws.”

There’s a strong corollary to entrepreneurship.

There are a ton of things that, if you decide to go after a startup, are going to happen at some point. But totally normal occurrences in the startup world throw off new entrepreneurs because they don’t know they’re normal. If you lived on the equator your whole life then showed up in New York and in November it started getting cold, you’d freak out.

There are a ton of these I can call out, but here’s my favorite — you can’t skip straight to the magic.

Just about everything you do in life will have already been optimized. Every job you had was likely done by someone before you and someone before them. The company you worked for had already built a process to acquire and keep customers, a process for new features, a process to hire and promote and fire. Your professional life has likely been iterating on a thing that already worked well enough to pay you a salary. You probably improved things, but the foundation was set.

With your business, we’re searching for a foundation. It’s a totally different thing. And, you likely won’t be the first to try the thing you’re trying. Which means the first 10 things you try to find that foundation that’ll work will likely be the first 10 things other people have tried, which means there won’t be a real opportunity.

People will be clustered around the first handful of ideas to attack a problem:

Which means we’re in a race to get all the things that won’t work out of the way.

Most entrepreneurs want a way to skip the line, but you can’t because we aren’t sure what we need to learn about our customers to skip the line.

So, the best we can do is create a process to make this part as fast and painless as possible. And, most importantly, to recognize that this is normal. If you are going to build a business, you’ll likely need to try more things than other people try, which means a lot of the things you try won’t work. And something not working doesn’t mean you’re on the wrong track, it means you’re on the right one. You’re pushing past the crowds to find the unique space.

If you play sports, you’re going to get injured. If you start a startup, you will do lots of things that won’t work all that well before you get to the thing that does. You can’t skip injuries and you can’t skip the “finding out” steps. It’s all part of it. When you run into something discouraging, get excited. That’s another moment when most people will quit, but you’ll build systems to keep moving to the right of the graph.