“Those times when you get up early and you work hard, those times when you stay up late and you work hard, those times when you don’t feel like working, you’re too tired, you don’t want to push yourself, but you do it anyway. That is actually the dream.” – Kobe Bryant
When I’m working with founders, one thing I always counsel them on is what start-up life is actually going to be like. Too many founders are only excited about what life is going to be like once they’re successful — they’ll be rich, famous and everyone will respect them.
They forget that 90% of start-ups fail.
More than that, they don’t recognize that the road to success, even if it does happen, is incredibly hard and rarely filled with wealth, fame or high self-esteem.
And if all you do on that road is ask “are we there yet,” spoiler alert: you’re probably never going to get there.
Even if you do all the work, you might not be successful. In fact, the overwhelming odds are that you will do all the work and still not be successful. So you better like the work. You better want to do the work more than anything else in the world.
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One of the first big projects I worked on with Megan (years before we came up with this crazy, post a bajillion times a day on LinkedIn idea) was my blog, Obvious Startup Advice. So, obviously, we’re going back to that for some of our content now. And, because Megan is a part of this too, she gets to pick her favorite one to share first. We wrote it in the wake of Kobe Bryant’s tragic death, highlighting one of my favorite quotes.