Leading Thought: No matter what you choose to pursue in life, there will always be competition, there will always be conflict, and there will always be bad characters working around the clock against you. The sooner you come to terms with that fact, the sooner you can focus on moving forward and achieving your team’s goals.
One question I regularly receive about the career path my business partner and I have chosen is: what is the most surprising thing you learned since graduating and building your own company? Without hesitation, my answer is: “It’s amazing - the number of people that will go out of their way to offer some form of assistance and help you achieve a goal, even when they have nothing to gain from it personally. The surprising part, however, is that for every one of those kind people, there are usually several more that are willing to go out of their way to stand in yours.” This isn’t to say that literally everyone is trying to compete with you or that there are far more bad characters out there than good. In fact, there are likely more people out there that won’t think twice about what you’re building because they’re so absorbed - understandably - with what they’re working on. If anything, this is meant to touch upon some of the less frequently acknowledged, unglamorous parts of entrepreneurship.
To slightly paraphrase a quote from Kevin Costner’s character, John Dutton, on Yellowstone: when you build something worth having, someone is always going to try to take it. This month, our firm is turning four years old and these words could not resonate stronger with my business partner and I. You don’t survive four years of growing a business from the ground up without having to overcome mountains upon mountains of challenges and adversity. For those who have known us since launching the company back on a cold November night in 2015, our firm has weathered a few storms to say the least. We’ve faced a decent share of tough competition, brutal conflicts, and bad characters within our relatively short history. Although, what helped us evolve at each inflection point was acknowledging that such challenges, regardless of how daunting, bizarre, or unnecessary, are just the nature of the game and something to move past.
Sounds simple, almost comically - acknowledging the threat and deciding to move past it - and that’s because it is simple. It’s not easy, but it is simple. Especially when you are in the heat of moment and the fog of war is thickest, it’s critical to be present, to acknowledge the threats at hand, and to keep moving through them. The alternative is giving up, and we don’t do that. It might be unsettling to think that there will always be competition, conflict, and bad characters, but that’s reality. Challenge is the one constant we all face. The difference is in how we choose to respond. Either directly or indirectly, intentionally or unintentionally, someone is always going to try to take what you’ve built or attempt to destroy it in the process. You are never out of the fight. However, you can choose to be consumed by that one constant or choose to become the one constant to that opposition - become a challenge for them that is always a step ahead.
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