Building on Bedrock

by Derek Lidow

  Many entrepreneurs strike an ill-advised balance because they do not understand what they’re trying to prove or because their desire for status makes them take unnecessary risks. Walt Disney went way beyond what he needed to spend in Kansas City to see if he could commercialize his animation skills. Sam Walton and Estée Lauder challenged themselves to demonstrate their commercializable skills before expanding beyond their modest original forays into business.

  How much motivation do we need to prove to ourselves we are worthy? Researchers have developed some scales to estimate the strength of motivations. The most popular scale in use right now is the “Grit Scale.” It measures how dedicated we are to accomplishing whatever we commit ourselves to do. Because we typically commit ourselves to doing things to satisfy our explicit motivations, the Grit Scale measures how well our explicit motivations align with our implicit ones.

  The existence of the Grit Scale yields a valuable insight: We can increase the chances of our entrepreneurial success by making our explicit motivations more consistent with our implicit motivations. If we can align our explicit and implicit motivations, then our actions become significantly more aligned with what we need to feel worthy. The difference in our ability to succeed once we align our own explicit and implicit motivations is analogous to the difference between the energy delivered by a 100-watt light bulb and a 100-watt laser. Both generate the same amount of light, but you can safely stare at a 100-watt light bulb, whereas looking into a 100-watt laser that focuses its light onto a single tiny spot would melt an eye in its socket.

  Unfortunately, the Grit Scale is untested relative to determining an absolute minimum value of motivation required to be a successful entrepreneur. Rather than looking to measure a metric we have not yet discovered, I have found it is most effective for an aspiring entrepreneur to honestly assess how well their implicit and explicit motivations align, and then to diligently improve the alignment. If an aspiring entrepreneur seeks to improve his or her motivational alignment over a sustained period, then he or she has the motivation to succeed. Simple.

  We can improve the alignment of our explicit motivations with our implicit ones in two different ways. First, through self-awareness, our motivations can become more focused and have more impact. By specifically understanding our implicit motivations, we can then focus the short-term actions controlled by our explicit motivations. For example, I have a burning desire to be needed that I did not become aware of until my mid-thirties. Up to that point, I had been a mediocre leader because I always acted in such a way as to prove to people that I should have been included in any activity that interested me. If I felt I had been left out, I became judgmental, disparaging whatever the person or group with whom I’d wanted to align myself did. I didn’t realize this, and neither did the people I was around. I was just labeled as moody and difficult. I thought these were traits I had been born with, instead of realizing they were symptoms of my motivation, characteristics that I could train myself to mitigate. When I finally discovered the source of these mysterious mood swings and counterproductive actions, I was able to channel my motivation so that my actions helped, rather than hindered, the work of my colleagues.

  Second, we can use techniques such as cognitive reappraisal to mitigate our irrational fears, or phobias, that interfere with our achieving our core implicit motivation. Many of our fears are rooted in the evolutionary development that makes us hyper-aware of things that could hurt us, so we can take action to avoid them. But we no longer need most of our evolution-based fears in order to survive. Social anxiety and fear of public speaking are common, and there are others that can dampen otherwise strong selfish entrepreneurial desires. Programs such as Toastmasters can often help people control their fear of public speaking or fear of public humiliation. Similarly, cognitive therapies prescribed by psychologists can help people mitigate a social fear of groups and strangers. Many fears today can be mitigated through cognitive routines and do not need to stand in the way of an aspiring entrepreneur doing what needs to be done.

  Being a truly motivated entrepreneur has much in common with being a Zen master. Buddhist monks and Zen masters meditate without changing position for many hours, overcoming what we would experience as great pain. Through marathon meditation, monks demonstrate the strength of their motivation to be masters of their minds. Nobody is born with a motivation to be a Zen master. It must develop, and in most people it only does so later in life. As an entrepreneur, you must be strongly motivated to succeed, and you can develop and shape that motivation through the application of self-awareness to the point where you can endure great hardships. Entrepreneurship requires a quasi-religious dedication to giving up almost all worldly pleasures in order to master the additional challenging skills required to achieve your true selfish desires and ambitions.

  Self-awareness skills, particularly mindfulness, can play a role in the discovery of hidden implicit motivations, sating desires or fears, and aligning explicit motivations. A great mindfulness coach or a skilled therapist can help you get your self-awareness skills to the level needed to align your actions with your implicit motivations.

  Today’s media hype encourages too many aspiring entrepreneurs to try to “shoot for the moon and use other people’s money.” This exhortation mistakenly implies that it takes moon shots and loads of money to satisfy implicit motivations. It does not. Dreaming about fortune and fame is an explicit motivation, not an implicit one. And misaligned explicit motivations, particularly those tied to fortune and fame, can lead unsuspecting entrepreneurs to take on significant risks that are ultimately inconsistent with why they really needed to be entrepreneurs in the first place. As a consequence, more entrepreneurs fail than would otherwise be consistent with the magnitude of the challenges they set. You should strive to understand your true implicit core motivations, control your distracting explicit motivations and irrational fears, and set your goals accordingly. If you have the grit to strive to align your motivations, then you likely have enough grit to succeed as an entrepreneur…if you can assemble the rest of the assets you need.

  How Much of an Idea

  How much of an idea you need is really a reflection of how much selfish motivation you have and what it will take to sate it. You only need an idea that over time will prompt enough happy people to hand you enough of their money that you’ll be satisfied with the result. You need an idea that is good enough to let you prove what you need to prove to yourself.

  If your mind and body pulsate with the intense need to prove to your billionaire father that you can be as successful as he is, then you’re going to need an idea that can make huge numbers of people with lots of money very happy. If you’re Jordan Monkarsh, you’ll need an idea that will create a business that ultimately serves at least as many customers as your dad’s butcher shop.

  The strength and value of an idea doesn’t have to be measured in monetary terms. If you’re Josephine Mentzer Lauter, alias Estée Lauder, then you need an idea that’s big enough to not only generate significant wealth, but to attract the prestigious friends and real estate that will get you accepted in high society. To Lauder, selling beauty cream would not have satisfied her if it only made her rich. She needed her business to win her acceptance in a higher social class, something money alone could not buy.

  You can measure the strength of your idea by conducting quick, low-cost experiments. These experiments are sometimes called minimum viable products, MVPs, or prototypes. A prototype enables you to test customer receptivity to what you want to sell—in other words, to test how much happiness your offering generates. With virtually no investment, Estée Lauder was able to sell her uncle’s beauty creams in beauty parlors and test what it would take to get a customer to buy. In conducting years of experiments with thousands of customers, there was no question that Estée was motivated to succeed. Furthermore, after more than a decade of testing herself, she also came to understand that she needed to create her own brand and sell it widely in order
to have an idea big enough to satisfy her ambitions.

  How Much Leadership

  Leadership skills are essential—you simply cannot accomplish much alone. No leadership skills, no success—period. The level of mastery you must achieve in practicing your leadership skills depends on how many people you need to help you and how much stress these people might be expected to endure.

  When Steve Jobs founded Apple at the age of twenty-two, he was a visionary, but he wasn’t a leader. Like many other successful entrepreneurs, he found partners who brought the requisite level of leadership skills to Apple. Jobs hired Mark Markula to be Chairman of the Board and Mark Scott to be CEO of Apple, and he let them handle all people-related tasks while he focused on development. Markula and Scott had the leadership skills to grow Apple faster than any company in history.

  Entrepreneurs who want to create a fast-growing business need masterful leadership skills at the outset. They won’t have time to develop those skills on the job because their enterprises will be in a constant state of flux as they grow.

  By contrast, Vidal, like many successful slow-growth entrepreneurs, acquired his leadership skills on the job, picking them up as the enterprise developed. But even slow-growth entrepreneurs need rudimentary leadership skills, if only to hire the right people and to make sure they’re productive. They must become students of leadership skills as soon as they form their company.

  Leadership is a skill and not a trait—it has nothing to do with charisma. Leadership is measured by how much stress, cumulatively and peak, followers are prepared to endure to support their leader in the attainment of his or her vision. Some followers are willing to endure the ultimate in peak stress—death—to support their leader; fortunately, that’s never a requirement for entrepreneurial leaders (unless you lead a drug cartel or other illegal enterprise).

  Some leaders use extrinsic motivators—e.g. money—to get their followers to do what they want and need. Other leaders, particularly entrepreneurial leaders, use some combination of the skills we ascribed to Sam Walton in the How To chapter. As we discussed in that chapter, Sam acquired many of his leadership skills by leading sports teams under the guidance of good coaches, and by leading student organizations. For Walton’s entire life, the employees of Walmart were willing to do whatever “Mr. Sam” asked.

  Walt got to experiment with leading, something he had not done while in school or even when working for the Red Cross in France, when he hired the staff for his Laugh-O-Gram Studios. That didn’t last too long, as nobody was willing to work for him once the money ran out, but it was very valuable experience. He had to entice older people to work for him when he was only twenty years old, which required him to at least understand his employees’ explicit motivations. His skills were basic enough to attract Ub Iwerks (once Walt offered to pay him the salary he demanded) to want to move to California, as well as many other talented animators and artists. Walt became adept in creating a vision of his company that talented artists felt would enable them to excel at their crafts. Animators that worked with Walt on Snow White considered it the high point of their career. Walt was open to everyone’s ideas, and they all felt they were breaking new ground on an almost-weekly basis. Walt—and Roy—spared no expense in letting everyone experiment with new ideas on how to portray emotions in drawings that moved on the screen.

  But Walt was considered tyrannical whenever he was under pressure or when he felt things were not working out as he had envisioned. Almost all his Oswald animators rebelled when given the chance. Later, even Ub Iwerks left Walt when he felt Walt no longer cared about what he had to say. Disney animators even went on strike after Snow White, as Walt refused to listen to their issues.

  Walt had a vision that attracted great artists to want to work with him, and he was skilled at making major changes happen to enable the implementation of his ideas. But Walt’s self-awareness never developed to the point where he selflessly cared about those that helped him. Roy mitigated some of Walt’s leadership issues with the non-artists that worked for Disney, but after the strike, Walt was never able to recreate the open and productive working relationship he had with his animators during the production of Snow White—nor was he interested in doing so. Walt was not a great leader, but he had enough leadership skill to attract major talent to his vision of new forms of entertainment. It was good enough to get him his breakthroughs, but it wasn’t good enough to continuously sustain the creativity he aspired to inspire.

  You can find many different leadership measures and assessments. Most of them aren’t very good. The best measurement and assessments will come from asking those you admire and trust to help you lead others. Many people in positions of power do not want other leaders in their areas of influence. You would not want to ask Walt Disney, if he were alive, to help you learn how to lead creative artists—but Roy likely would have lent a hand. This paradigm often applies to parents as well. Some parents have agendas for their children that they’re not entirely aware of, and are unconsciously biased in answering a child whom they may or may not want to see start their own business.

  Even with help, leadership ability will always come down to practice and skill development. Opportunities to practice leadership skills abound. Practicing leadership can be something as simple as putting together a fun group event. If you’re not willing to reach out to people you do not know and help them do something they could not have done without you, then you should expect to be doing most of the work in your startup yourself, or with others in a very uncoordinated and unmotivated fashion. And your business results will be accordingly mediocre and disappointing.

  How Much Attention

  You cannot sell anything without the attention of potential customers. Every successful entrepreneur needs potential customers to focus on their product or service for enough time to internalize whether it could make them happy. If the entrepreneur offers a product or service that the customer feels will make their life much better, then the customer will take the necessary actions to hand over the money they were asked for.

  If you’re looking to sell good-tasting sausages, it makes sense to rent a stand on Venice Beach to capture the attention of passers-by—just long enough to get their gastric juices flowing. Jordan’s yelling, “Hey, Handsome, want to impress your girlfriend…” was the perfect approach for the men strolling by his sausage stand. Many dozens of places on Venice Beach compete for customer attention—without the shout-out, Jordan couldn’t have built his business as fast as he did.

  But you must to do more than simply make someone aware your product exists. Jordan needed only to wave a mouth-watering sausage at potential customers, who then decided whether they were going to bite. On the other hand, if you plan to deliver software that automates accounting for asset management firms, getting customers to a buying decision could take weeks or even months of work. You first have to directly answer the questions and concerns of all the “influential” people inside the firm who will use or access the software. You then need the undivided attention of the CEO of the firm and other key employees over several meetings to make them feel happy that spending the company’s money on your software will help their careers, directly enrich their lives, or both. Furthermore, those meetings should take place without the distractions that could generate unhappy feelings that could accidentally become associated with the product (I had a potential customer with whom I was supposed to meet on 9/11 to sign up for the services of the company I had founded. Of course, our meeting was cancelled, but their traumatic associations with our meeting that hadn’t taken place never dissipated enough for them to engage). You need the focused attention of many people for long enough to implant feelings in them that your product can simplify a complex process at an easily affordable price.

  As the opening vignette in the book describes, Sam Walton did a great job of getting the attention of potential customers by initially offering product for excitingly low prices. Estée Lauder pioneered giving away great-lookin
g samples of beauty products to attract attention. Today, it is standard to try and get attention by offering a free entry-level version of an app or software products on the Internet. Indeed, the practice is now so common that most free stuff gets ignored unless you’re giving away something with significant tangible value.

  Entrepreneurs are almost always deficient in how they plan to get enough customer attention to give themselves even a chance of success. The math is simple, and the research you need to have on-hand isn’t all that hard to come by, either:

  How long will it take for someone who doesn’t know anything about your product or service to fall in love with it enough to give you the money you ask for it in return?

  How many customers with the disposition to fall in love with your product or service do you need to make a profit?

  How many potential customers do you need to get the attention of to find enough customers who actually fall in love with your product and give you the money you ask for?[19]

  Multiply A times C (where C is much, much bigger than B) and you’ll likely find that you require many thousands of hours of customer attention to have any chance of succeeding.

  Well-financed entrepreneurs almost always hire experienced marketing executives to attract the attention of potential customers. But even experienced marketing executives can’t reduce the amount of attention that’s required for a potential customer to internalize how they feel about your product. That amount of time is dictated by how complex, and how visceral or inspiring, your product or service is. Experienced marketing executives can make sure that you create the most positive experience possible once you’re in front of potential clients. They can also figure out how you can get in front of the most potential customers for the lowest cost. Experienced marketing executives can make sure you don’t waste any of the precious time in front of the customer. Nonetheless, there is a minimum amount of customer attention required for their internalization of the corresponding positive emotion that will be required for any product or service.