Startup Life 101: The Marathon
Being successful in all aspects of your life – your work, your relationships, your community and your personal life – is not easy especially when working at a startup. Conventional wisdom is you have to work 18 hour days, 7 days a week to succeed. Yet maybe it’s not necessarily the best way to succeed?
http://flickr.com/photos/beforethecoffee/
What got me thinking about writing about this was re-connecting with a professor I knew from the Wharton school, Stewart Friedman. He recently wrote a book and teaches a class titled Total Leadership: Be a Better Leader, Have a Richer Life
I will not do the concepts complete justice but the NY Times summarized his ideas as “Get a Life: 101”. Total Leadership is a process to optimize all parts of your life – yourself, your family, your work and your community – in order to be more successful and ideally more happy. You do this by clarifying and having a plan for what is important in all the domains of your life (self, family, work and community); you then engage with the people in all those domains and make sure they understand what’s important; and then experiment and figure out what are the ways to achieve the things that matter in all the domains in your life. You can read more about it on Stew’s blog too.
This past week I presented to one of his classes and this is the first of three posts about applying Total Leadership to startup life.
Marathon
An important first metaphor used by many and important for applying Total Leadership is that a startup is a marathon and not a sprint.
Now, I have never actually run a marathon. I actually only like to run if I am being chased. But I do like to ride my bike and I (surprise, surprise!) think startup life is a lot more like the Tour De France (surprise, surprise!). The Tour has multiple stages – all challenging in their own way. It’s a race of 2,000 to 2,500 miles happening over 21 days or “stages”. You start off “easy” riding more than 100 miles a day on flat roads that end in a short sprint, you have mountain stages that climb the highest peaks in the Alps and Pyrenees, you have an individual time trial during which each rider races against the clock, and many other hard rides. And it also happens to be a team sport. The diversity of challenges and duration certainly compare to a startup.
To win the Tour, one of the first keys to success is having a good plan. I recently wrote about planning in “If you don’t know where you are going, then you’re lost” and won’t repeat that post here. Suffice it to say that by first having a plan for what you need to achieve then, and only then, can you succeed in winning a Tour de France or having a successful life in a startup.
In addition to planning (and having a huge heart, strong legs and massive lungs!), another key ingredient for success in the Tour is setting the right pace.
And that’s startup life too. It’s important to work hard but not work all the time. It’s important to known when to work intensely to achieve a key milestone yet to relax and enjoy success. It’s important to have a pace for your work life that is maintainable and sustainable with the other aspects of your life. And to invest time in yourself and your family. Why? Because if you do not have the right pace and burn out, you will not likely make the best decisions, be the best teammate or team leader, and you will not be prepared to deal with the unplanned challenges that occur all the time. That is true for yourself and for how you act as a leader. By leading with an eye for the long term, you will ensure a more engaged team with lower attrition which makes it more likely the startup will be successful.
This does not mean that startup life is easy. It’s one of the hardest things you can do. But there are things you do which can make it better for yourself and as a leader.
Now many of you are saying it’s impossible! You have to work all the time to be successful in a startup! Rumor has it (Ok, it’s in a blog post on the NY Times) that President Obama played basketball or exercised almost every day on the campaign trail. And today as President he gets up in the morning, spends time with his kids, reads the newspaper and gets to the office (The Oval Office that is!) each morning around 9am. If the President can do that, then “yes you can” too. Oh and for all you Republicans out there, Ronald Reagan was known to do the same thing.
In summary, one of the keys to practicing Total Leadership is that you live your startup life with a plan and with a sustainable, long term pace.
Next up will be a post on the importance of Leadership and why “Total Leadership” is not just a marketing ploy to get people to buy into what might seem like a simple time management philosophy.
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