- mandate
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- you’re obviously not working hard enough
you’re obviously not working hard enough
note: hmm i set out to try to contextualize how hard it is to probably start a company that gets anywhere, but feel like somewhere in the weeds here, my head went up my ass and I started sounding like
harder than an olympic gold medal
everyone knows that you could put in 16 hour days for over 15 years to train at a sport and still not even qualify for the olympics, let alone compete, let alone medal, let alone win gold
everyone also knows that the upside after winning gold is not INCREDIBLY financially lucrative
and of course - everyone knows that about ~350 gold medals are awarded each olympics, which comes to about ~90 gold medalists made a year (i’m assuming team awards balance out against multiple-medal-winners)
what if i told you of another award. an award that in over 8 years - only 223 have achieved (~28 people a year) that anyone can attempt w/o a decade of training and preparation. an award that comes with it a financial upside of several million dollars - and an immediate career catapulting that takes you into the upper echelons of the business world?
it’s obvious the higher payout, lower barrier to entry, concentrated time horizon over which you achieve it and lower success rate would lead to the award being MUCH harder to achieve
something where working 12 hour days would be table stakes to even attempt - and even then most would probably still fail
yea no shit - i’m talking about exiting a company for more than $1B in market cap
but for some reason - we don’t intuitively think about starting a company as as grueling a process as becoming an olympic gold medalist.
if you succeed as a founder - plenty of people will say you were just lucky, and if you fail they’ll say you weren’t lucky
but you’d never say that to michael phelps or serena williams
for some reason we think there’s more luck in building a company - and sports are meritocratic in a way that building large enduring businesses is not.
people regularly sign up for startups expecting to get great benefits, high base pay, and fantastic work life balance.
but if we heard some 15 year old talk about how they plan on winning the olympic gold medal for fencing - but only wanted to work during work hours and asked about the work life balance of being a pro athlete - we would correctly laugh them out of the room.