Settle In if You Want Entrepreneurial Success

Entrepreneurs in a hurry are more likely to fail

The best entrepreneurs take their time and settle in. If you are in a hurry, you’ll take the kind of shortcuts that will cut your business off at the knees. People in a hurry don't build great solutions that scale.  In response to the “move fast and break things” mantra made popular by Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook (née Meta), Dan Sullivan, leadership coach to hundreds of successful entrepreneurs, says “go slow and build.”

Motivation

What’s your motivation for building a successful company? If you are in this game just for the potential wealth, and if you don't really love your customers and their challenges, then you will consciously or subconsciously take shortcuts, ignore secondary and tertiary information that could sink your venture, and be much less likely to win.  

Successful entrepreneurs often have a burning desire to build something lasting and to solve a big problem. Entrepreneurship is the craft of empathy at work on behalf of your customers. What does your customer really need? Talk to your customers, understand them, and empathize with them to increase your chances of success.

The Power of Commitment

The human mind is incredible as specializing to solve repeated problems. That might be a game you’ve played a thousand times, or it might be a problem space in a business that you’ve mentally committed to. If you are willing to settle in, if that aligns with your motivation and empathy for your customer, then you’ll devote the time needed to specialize your mind to solving the problem your customers face for the foreseeable future. That commitment is a powerful advantage over the entrepreneurs who are in a hurry to get in and get out. That commitment will allow you to build relationships, internalize dynamics between major players, and intuit how the market will react to different pressures.