This is a great video on entrepreneurship from Guy Kawasaki’s blog. It is rich with fantastic stories and wisdom from some of Silicon Valley’s greatest entrepreneurs.
One question by Guy regarding Joe Kraus’ (Co-Founder and CEO, JotSpot) advice on “good old fashion persistence” as a key to start-up success left me a little confused. Basically, Guy asked Joe whether or not persistence can become “dumb.” In other words, when should an entrepreneur stop being persistent? Was Guy testing Joe, or was he really serious?
After all, one of my favorite lessons on persistence comes from Guy’s book, Rules for Revolutionaries. In chapter 10, “Don’t Let Bozosity Grind You Down (Ne Te Terant Molarii),” a cartoon shows a young boy planting a carrot seed expecting it to eventually grow. Every family member told him it would not grow, but the little boy continued to water and care for the little seed - he persisted. The end of the cartoon shows the little boy wheel barreling a gigantic carrot away! Was the boy smart or dumb persisting?
This is certainly the “entrepreneur’s dilemma” - knowing when to persist and when not to be insane (doing the same thing over and over expecting different results).
I heard a wise old businessman once say that the key to success is persistence and the reason for most failures is procrastination (saw it on CNN or CSPAN, etc.). Perhaps this is what Guy might have been referring to as “dumb persistence”- persistently not doing things that you should be doing and persistently doing things that do not produce results. Either way it’s procrastinating from doing things that could make a difference.
Of course, as an entrepreneur you are trying to convince people of something they did not know they did not they needed (e.g. personal computer). So there is still a lot of grey matter to work through day-to-day and sometimes you will just have to rely on “blind faith,” as Bo Peabody likes to say.
It reminds me of Steve Jobs and NeXT. At one point he had the opportunity to license the NeXTSTEP OS to IBM in the early 1990s. Could this have been the swing factor that might have prevented Microsoft’s dominance? Then again, Steve might not have sold it to Apple in 1997 and worked his way back to launch the iPod ecosystem. NeXT is certainly a story about blind faith and persistence.
Steve Jobs on Connecting the Dots: “Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.”
Steve Jobs on Death: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.”
Thanks for the inspiring and sobering video! Be sure to check it out.
PS - Guy Kawasaki is coming to Cleveland to speak on September 6th. Go here to register.
For the first four years of a bamboo tree’s life, while the roots are spreading underground, only a tiny shoot sprouts. In the fifth year, the bamboo tree grows up to eighty feet!
