Stick-to-itiveness
Starting a business, any type of business, is at the same time thrilling, fun, overwhelming, and hard. This concept in your head is coming to life in the real world, and it’s thrilling to take it from an idea to reality, and daydream about the potential impact to real customers and clients. It’s fun to learn new things and meet new people and build systems and processes from scratch (that might only be fun for me (?)), and put your sign up or website up and tell people about your business. And you get to meet real-life people who have a need that your product solves and you are able to meet that need–how great is that? Pretty great!
But also, starting a business can also be overwhelming and hard and comes with some major roller-coaster moments. When clients tell you something they didn’t like, they cancel a contract, or they don’t come back to buy your product anymore. Having quiet periods with no or few sales that make you question everything about the business. Spending money and not seeing money coming in. It’s hard to not take it personally when it’s something that was in your head and now you’re taking every “no” or “not right now” or complete silence as a rejection. It’s hard to be detached when it’s your thing, your company, your idea being evaluated.
What business and startup culture tells you about entrepreneurship is that it takes hustle. There is certainly a lot of actual work to get done when you’re starting or building a business, and someone has to do that work. But hustle needs some help on the journey from curiosity, determination, and resilience to be able to weather the inconsistency of the early stages, to be nimble enough to learn and pivot when necessary, and to keep your own sense of worth steady in the ups and downs.
Easy to say, harder to do. We are all prone to feeling overwhelmed and tempted to give up along the way, it’s a natural feeling and emotion when the challenge gets hard. So how do we move forward even when the feelings overwhelm us and we want to chalk it up to failure and go back to something more familiar?
1) Discipline. Set a goal and make a plan that you think will result in success for that goal. We have experience doing this in other areas of our lives: paying off debt, learning a new skill, starting a new habit. Create the finish line, then work backwards to create the plan that will get you through today, this week, this month, this quarter and get you closer to that goal. Use the scientific method. Create a hypothesis for how to achieve a goal, put a plan into action, test the hypothesis and analyze the data, pivot as necessary, try again. Following the plan even when you don’t feel like it is the key to making anything a success. Our feelings change, the plan doesn’t. Create it, follow it, adapt and keep going!
2) Mindset: Believe in your ability to figure it out. Believe in your capacity to learn and grow and adapt and make your business successful. Look at times that you have succeeded in the past for positive bias confirmation–you figured that out, you will figure this out. Review your own strengths, dream big dreams, and believe that you will succeed, so you need to keep going.
3) Reinforcement: You’re going to need mentors, coaches, advisors, and cheerleaders. People who will support you and believe in you even when you’re struggling to believe in yourself. Supportive friends and family and networks that may have done this already and believe that you can do it, too, or even if they haven’t, they believe that you can and will. People willing to advise, to help, to share you with their networks, and bring you customers and clients. You and your people will need to work together to keep your self-esteem steady, to know that you are worthy and valuable because you are who you are, not for what is happening for your company today, so find your people!
Starting a business is hard: failure happens, rejections happen, loneliness happens, empty pipelines happen! You have to stick with it and not lose the belief that got you here in the first place. The concept of stick-to-itiveness is defined as “relentless perserverence.” Those of us in business for ourselves or with a small team, building something that is not yet fully realized or seen, need this concept above all others, and it will serve us well. As a dear friend told me back when I launched my own business, and I repeat to myself over and over again multiple times per week in my head as I build it even bigger and better:
Keep going!