Playing Hurt + Buffer
As I write this, my foot is killing me.
I’m sitting in a green chair you might see in the background of a Zoom call with me — one that goes unused so frequently it might make you think, “Wonder if he ever sits in that thing?”
The answer used to be “rarely” but now it’s “constantly” because if I stack pillows on the foot rest I can get my achilles above my heart, which apparently keeps the swelling and pain down. But it ain’t working today.
Also, my son had surgery on Wednesday (he’s doing great), Ruby went to the vet Thursday (she’s great, too), our child care fell through Friday and I still can’t drive (achilles), so my wife has to shuttle me to physical therapy and back most mornings at 6am before she goes off to her job.
Things feel…particularly hectic. But, if I asked you about your week, I bet you’d tell me a similar story. The characters would be different but the theme would be the same. Whatever plan you had crumbled.
I had a physical therapist in high school who trained me as I prepped for college basketball. I got a few injuries in a row and at one point and was complaining about my bad luck when he scolded me in his thick Russian accent — “you can’t play sports and then get surprised and mad when you get hurt. Being hurt is as much a part of basketball as dribbling. You will always be hurt so you need to learn how to play well hurt or stop playing.”
Everything I described above is as much a part of starting a business as messaging on a landing page. Every successful entrepreneur builds a company by “playing hurt” 85% of the time — by figuring out how to be flexible as life piles on.
You hear about resilience as a key characteristic for entrepreneurs and probably assume that means “overcoming no’s” — being persistent when 200 consecutive VCs say no or your customers are fickle or your co-founder leaves. And sure, that might be a part of resilience. But it’s a far rarer part than the actual resilience you’ll need - the daily resilience to play hurt. To not be surprised or upset when plans crumble and to find ways to make progress anyway.
There’s a Tony Robbins quote I can’t find where he talks about how most people aren’t successful because they’re surprised by routine occurrences like the recession that happens every 10 or so years you can set your clock by or traffic on a morning commute. He says it’s like being surprised and panicking every time the weather starts to change in November.
The way to be resilient daily is to build systems to protect your willpower. Here are a few ways to do it. But, the biggest way is to recognize that every week something will happen to screw up your plans and your job is to dance with it, not toss up your hands and quit.
1
Only work on stuff that moves the needle. When you have pockets of time, make sure what you’re doing is consequential.
A simple check here is to ensure what you’re doing is attacking the riskiest current assumption you’ve got about your business by gathering external data points that validate or disprove it. I like using the “this business will fail if…” framing.
So, when you start, you might say “this business will fail if I can’t find any customers who care about the problem I want to solve.” Great. Every second, then, is spent finding customers that care about the problem you want to solve. Emailing them, showing up places they are, speaking to them on the phone. That’s the only thing that matters. Until you find some customers you think care and develop a new riskiest thing — “this business will fail if I can’t convert (get some form of intent from) a high percentage of this first group of customers from a cold email and landing page with my best messaging.” Then, every second is spent on that. And on and on.
Only spending time on “my company will fail if I’m wrong about X” stuff lets you make progress even if you only get an hour in one week because that’ll be a high leverage hour.
2
Build SOPs for anything you do more than once so it’s outsource-able. You might think this doesn’t apply to you if you don’t have budget to outsource — you’ll just be doing the stuff so why build an SOP that describes how to do it?
But, the best way to build a business is to act like the CEO from day one. Your plan is to grow and outsource non-CEO tasks, so make it easy to do that when the time comes.
When you start, you’ll be “hiring” yourself to do most/all of these repetitive tasks. But the second we have any budget - or the opportunity to get an intern or a partner — we need to have the systems of the business ready to hand off.
SOPs also drive into your brain the repetitive work you’re doing and make it clear it should be outsourced or automated because it doesn’t meet the bar for #1.
More on SOPs: An SOP for Testing a Startup Idea
3
Add a bunch of buffer to your system (don’t be surprised when you get hurt) and grab crevaces.
If you want to work on your startup 5 hours a week, block off 10.
When you find yourself with 15 minutes, grab an SOP or something off your Five Minute List and go. Be ready to be a cockroach — surviving in the cracks and chaos of the rest of your life.
When you miss a week, don’t get down or assume you won’t ever have time. Bounce back.
Your time is going to get sopped up like the bread in french onion soup. Don’t be surprised, and build around it.
This whole thing is about momentum. If you get stopped dead every time something happens in your life, you’ll never get anywhere. You’ve got to build a system to play hurt. Because you’ll always be hurt. But you can handle it.