Mental Resilience in entrepreneurship
I’m fully convinced entrepreneurship is a mental battle. Logistically, it’s not that difficult. We all know the motions. Create Content, Help Customers, Build a Product, Iterate. Not complicated. But the hard part is staying on task over many years. Real businesses take at least 5 years to form, and 10 years to reach their full potential. The stories you hear of 8 months to an exit are one in 10 million at best, so you might as well just go put your money on black at the casino if you want to play that game.
My name’s Josh, I’m co-founder and CEO at Interact. Interact is a $3.3M ARR Quiz Software founded in 2013 with my two co-founders while we were in our second year of college at UCLA. It’s the only job I’ve ever had, and it’s been a typical business, constant problems, constant chaos, constant, uncertainty. Yet we have persisted over nearly a decade and a half, remaining profitable and bootstrapped the entire time.
At this stage my simple advice to myself is keep your eye on the ball. I’m a football and baseball guy, played those sports throughout my life, and truly enjoy them. I played cornerback and middle field, both positions involve tracking the ball from the quarterback or bat all the way to where you are, and making your path to intercept the ball for an interception or catch. This is exactly what running a company is. You spot the opportunities, then chart a path to intercept that opportunity, keeping your eye on the ball the whole time.
In business, this might look like seeing that social media is blowing up for business content. So you chart yourself a path to intercept that demand with your style of content. You build a playbook, execute, and watch film on yourself to improve. Each week you iterate, just like you would the Monday after a football game. None of that is hard.
What is hard are the comments, my favorite so far is some guy commented on my video about content flywheels and just said “Bro, your hairline didn’t show up for work today” incredible comment, well played. The hard part is posing a video that gets 6 views while you run a company with 8,000 customers that include NASA and over 100 NYT best selling authors. What will they think if they see my goofy video that got no views? The hard part is staying consistent building up this new channel when it delivers no revenue, and your other channels that are solid, but have run out of runway for growth, are delivering all of your revenue. It feels defeating.
The playbook is easy, you can learn it in a few weeks. Executing on that playbook over 3 years, which is the standard amount of time it takes for a new strategy to deliver consistent recurring revenue - close impossible. That’s true for me, and I know for a fact it’s true for other founders. Every single day I talk to people who know the playbooks, they know the strategies, but what they get stuck on is being able to actually execute when all those mental battles get in the way.
So what’s the answer?
I don’t have one. There isn’t one. What I do is work with two incredible co-founders, two business coaches, meet regularly with other founders, exercise every day, meditate every day, sit in the sauna every day, walk outside in nature every day, keep the same schedule every day, eat healthy every day, connect people I care about in my life outside of work every day. Those are the practices that work for me to enable 14 years of mental resilience, but I don’t know what works for you. I think the only throughline between people who stay resilient is some sort of system that works for their life. It’s not random.
