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Speaker 1:
This is Unleashing Leadership, and I'm your host, travis Moss. And season five, we've got our co-host, dave Nurchi. We're on the book Hard Things about hard things by Ben Horowitz. We're digging right in today. Even if you know what you are doing, things are still goingbacks. No incentives to sell you anything other than just good advice. Find out more at seedpg as in planning group seedpgcom. All right, dave, two parts of this. Number one let's just talk about how it's just really hard. I think that if it wasn't hard, more people would just have done stuff. The reality is that being a leader building a business, leading a team, the shit's hard.
Speaker 2:
From every angle you get self-doubt right like go ahead yeah, no, I mean, that's the the saying right, if it wasn't hard, then everyone just be doing it. Um, it takes the commitment, it takes the failures right. I think some some of this is we're talking about failures here like things are going to go wrong even when you prepare. You know what you're doing, but you will fail because it is hard. So how do you handle that? How do you move forward from? That is, I think, probably where I think this goes from there.
Speaker 1:
It's the chicken and the egg. Is it because things go wrong that it's really hard, or is it because it's really hard that things go wrong?
Speaker 2:
I think both ways Right.
Speaker 1:
Well, I think my perspective and my cocoon of being I kind of look at it as it is things break all the damn time. Things that you think are perfect and in order don't turn out. People that you, you, you're relying on, don't show up right, this stuff just happens because life happens and you can't control all. There's just chance and everything. You know there's regulatory changes, there's system failures, there's technology you know oopsies. There's regulatory changes, there's system failures, there's technology, you know oopsies. There's all kinds of stuff that happens right. There's brilliant ideas that never get off the ground, that kind of stuff.
Speaker 1:
What makes it hard is that you, when you're in leadership, you're kind of like the punching bag of that. You're absorbing because people who say they don't want to be in sales. If you're in business, you're in sales, because one of the biggest things that I have to sell every day is the vision. Right, I have to come to people and say this is the vision and this is what we're doing. This is why we need to get behind this and, you know, foster and cultivate that relationship so that it happens easily for everybody. So when it doesn't work out, you know, I, yeah, it's it's like getting punched, because it's not only the fact that it doesn't work out.
Speaker 1:
Okay, back to drawing boards. We lost this time, we lose those resources, whatever. But now I got to come back to the team and say sorry, guys, this didn't work out. Here's how we're going to pivot and the whole team has put their time into it and effort into it, and you know what I mean. So it's a huge when you that's to me that's where the hard part comes and that's why it's hard. So most people what happens is, I think they kind of like they quit. Yeah, I don't want to be the guy who has to tell people oh, it didn't work out. Now we've got to pivot and move on and look at everybody's sad faces. Right, I don't want to be that guy. I'd rather point the finger at that guy. And so you know people. I think people try to kind of avoid those situations if they've been in them, because they're not fun.
Speaker 2:
Yep, and that, I think, is why it's hard yeah, I think, um, you, you have two choices, right. You like you said you, you said you quit, you say I'm not doing this, I'm going to be on the other side pointing the finger. Or you keep going forward, despite the tough conversations or the tough things that come up. It's a lot of it's resiliency, right. You got to be resilient as things happen and you have to really believe in what you're doing and you know the vision you're creating. Or it's very easy to get discouraged, right, because people will tell you you're wrong. They'll tell you you're failing. People like doing that, right. They like to look at the person like I told you.
Speaker 2:
So yeah, I told you so, or you should have just got the safe job. You know those kinds of conversations, that's what you'll hear. So if you can't, if you don't have that belief in your, in yourself and what you're doing in your company, then it is easy to get discouraged, so that that's hard to do, right. It's hard to take the opposite stance on that and say, well, no, I am right, this is what I'm supposed to be doing.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, and think about that when, a couple episodes ago, we were talking about investing for the future. So you're making investments for the future which aren't showing up on your P&L yet and stuff's happening and it's just hitting you. It's like, okay, this isn't working, that's not working, this broke. That broke and you could be an expert on what you're doing Doesn't mean that there's not aspects of things that aren't going to come up and happen. Right, and anybody who says, no, I can control everything, well, you can't control. If you're going to have cancer, let's say you know, random, some kind of random cancer is going to get you. Or maybe you say, well, I eat really healthy, so it never happened to you. You can't control that. Somebody's not going to run a stop sign and hit you with their car everything off, even if you are absolutely perfect at everything, right.
Speaker 1:
So it's when you're thinking about, okay, I got to invest for the future, I'm looking at this long-term kind of payoff. And then things go wrong in the interim and I'm just getting beat left and right and, like you said, here comes the self-doubt and everything. Like I was saying, that's when people start to quit. They say, you know, this isn't working. I just got to get out and I think people a lot of times get out just before the payoff comes or just before things would have started getting easier, and it's because they just our minds can't take it. You know, and everybody's got a different perspective of time, but it seems like the perspective is getting shorter and shorter. So it's like, oh, I've been doing this for three months and it hasn't worked out. It must not work.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, it's like, well, maybe if you did it for four months it would work, or maybe you're supposed to do it for 18 months. You're not even, like you know, a quarter of the way in yet. And you yet, and you're already talking about quitting. You look at professional athletes, people who make it big time. They didn't wake up when they were 18 and go into the draft. They probably, for the majority of them, they probably started when they were eight years old or even younger, in whatever sport that they're working on, and they didn't get paid. Well, now they can get paid earlier, but you know, used to be, you didn't get paid until you made it to the pros.
Speaker 2:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
Right. I mean so our perspective of time and our investment in the future.
Speaker 1:
For some reason like with business, I think, because it's all about quarterly reports and reporting to your manager what happened this week, and that kind of stuff A lot of it's public it's been skewed and if things aren't going good for a very short amount of time, all of a sudden we think it's broken and that's, and I think that that's and I at least in my experience why a lot of this stuff is really hard is because of all those pressures and the fact that I've got to perform and I've got to keep people happy and excited about the future and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, and at the same time I've got to absorb all the blows because at least if I can absorb it, it's easier to pivot the rest of the team back in a different direction.
Speaker 1:
And that's kind of maybe the psyche of a leader.
Speaker 2:
Yeah, yeah, and I mean you, yeah, yeah, and I mean you know we, we talk about health and wellness a lot. Right, we make that. That's a thing at seed we talk a lot about. A lot of people are into that and it's the same story. Right, you talked about athletes and stuff and that stuff's hard and it takes time. Right, like you said, someone might try a new nutrition plan. Start eating better, right, start working out, and are you gonna see a different physique in a month? Probably, not Two months, you know, probably not.
Speaker 2:
Maybe some little changes here and there, but if you're not motivated for the right reasons of, well, I want to live longer, I want to feel better, that kind of stuff, and you're just worried about some of these minor things, or you get the outside pressures, right, no one's ever. You always hear all the treat yourself, or that's fine, you know, have the extra treat, or the drink, it's a birthday, it's this or that, you don't get the pressure. People don't like to pressure you into doing like the right, like the healthy thing, right. So it's kind of that same thing of outside influences, not necessarily in your favor, of what the goal might be, and that's what makes it so hard because you're not going to see those results right away.
Speaker 1:
But you might have a lot of changes going on inside your body as you start to get healthier that you don't know about, well, the difference between somebody who ends up being really successful and does like amazing things the type of guy that somebody says, oh they're so lucky, right, you know what the difference is between them and everybody else. They're not sorry for themselves. They take those blows and in a lot of ways it like fortifies their fire, right, like shit goes wrong. It's really hard. They get through it. They go damn, look at how good I am now, right, and I'm not saying in like an arrogant way, I'm just saying like you're at home on the couch having a drink and you're thinking about what you've accomplished and you're like I got through that. Now I know what that's like man. Now everything else that is less extreme than that is a no big deal.
Speaker 1:
Yeah, look what I can do now, because we don't like you're talking about diet and physical health and stuff like that mental health we don't know what we're capable of. You know, society kind of puts boxes around us and says this is what you can do. You know, here's the metric versus you doing it and going. Well, that proves I can get outside of that metric. That proves that I don't have to be that number. Yep, and I think we just need more of that, but I think that this is where it starts is it's like you're going to have hard stuff thrown at you and the difference between the people who are going to be successful and the people who are going to say I had a chance, but it was too hard, yeah, or it wasn't fair. A lot of times People were feeling sorry for themselves versus the people who say you know what, buck up boy, you know, let's get back after this.
