Here’s a good one that I heard recently – “success is a lagging measure of effort”.
Or, when you’re starting a business you have to do a whole load of activity without seeing anything move before, seemingly overnight, it does move.
For me, this is something I’ve always struggled with in any business I’ve been part of, mainly because the job that I do – building software -- the success bit doesn’t tend to lag that far behind the effort. You build some software, you ship it… success.
But business development activities – marketing, sales, building partnerships – those do have a massive lag. If you’re doing some B2B marketing, you have to keep plugging into that for six months before it even looks like it’s moving.
So next time you think you’re getting nowhere in your startup and you’re struggling with applying the consistent effort that people tell you that you need to apply, just remember that “success is a lagging measure of effort”.
And just like that, the first short post I’ve ever done that I could loop round so that it seamlessly starts again. But, I don’t want to get you all used to that, so I won’t.