It makes me crazy when I hear “gurus” teach that there’s an easy way to build a business. Every successful entrepreneur I’ve ever talked to has told me their journey was the opposite of easy.
It’s counterproductive and dangerous for people to believe that. This sets them up for failure. You’re better off beginning your entrepreneurial leap believing it’s hard and then discovering it’s easier than you thought.
I’ve been inside hundreds of businesses and have yet to see one that takes no effort. I love it when one of my clients talks about another company that also happens to be one of my clients and says, “That business is so easy; I wish I had that one.” I think to myself, “Oh, if you only knew.”
Frankly, if you did come up with a business that was easy to run, odds are the competition would come out of the woodwork. Within a year or two, due to such fierce competition, the business wouldn’t be so easy anymore.
Here are four great quotes that have motivated me in regard to this discipline of working hard.
#1 Will Smith:
“The only thing that I see that is distinctly different about me is that I’m not afraid to die on the treadmill. You might have more talent than me, you might be smarter than me, but if we get on a treadmill together, there are two things: one, you’re getting off first, or two, I’m gonna die. It’s really that simple.”
#2 Tommy Caldwell, the legendary rock climber and author of The Push:
“I can suffer for and focus on the thing longer than anyone else.”
#3 Albert Einstein:
“It’s not that I’m so smart, it’s just that I stay with problems longer.”
#4 Theodore Roosevelt:
“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.”
For the first five years of creating the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), I worked tirelessly. I obsessed every minute of every day honing, refining, and testing hundreds of ideas and options. I delivered over 500 full-day sessions in those years, with entrepreneurs and their leadership teams, until I perfected the model. Until they loved it. Until I made a huge impact on their lives.
I then spent three years writing my first book whenever I could find time, making sure that it was a complete how-to manual for anyone who wanted an operating system to run a better business. I constantly got feedback from my clients and the general public to make sure they loved it. And then I spent the next 10 years with my partner, Don Tinney, building a team of hundreds of EOS Implementers to spread the ideas to the world.
During this period, I definitely sacrificed family time, time with friends, and my health. Regardless, I was always driven by one overriding passion: to help those entrepreneurs have a better quality of life, make more money, do what they love, and make an impact on the world.
Hard work and passion will fuel you to do almost anything to prove, create, or deliver your idea, product, or service to the world.
Hard work is one of eight disciplines that I teach in Entrepreneurial Leap. While there is no one way to take your leap and no perfect set of steps, this handful of disciplines, when you are ready, will serve you well and increase your odds of success.
Please take a few minutes right now and think about a time you worked really hard to accomplish something and how you felt once you accomplished it.
