I’m not the biggest fan of motivational talks but every once in a while I come across one that really strikes a chord with me.
Pascal Finette‘s presentation yesterday at the Startup Week conference was one of those, and was probably the best presentation of the day too.
He sees running as a metaphor for life and for business and he used it to provide entrepreneurs with a list of what is needed for building a successful startup.
Along the traditional and well-tested blood, sweat and tears approach Pascal added the necessity to win, to not be in the race just for the sake of it but to go for the win.
Also, the importance of setting you goals high, of not shying away from being ambitious. Both of these points are echoed in the title of the talk which is also the title of this post.
Here is his deck and below are the points he made in the presentation, hopefully at some point in the near future a video of the presentation will be available too.
1) Train hard – training is your starting point.
2) Make sacrifices – good ol’ no pain gain.
3) Make positive choices – in his first startup among all the investors he found he went for the one with the best terms, against his guts. When the whole thing turned sour the takeaway was – trust yourself and make positive choices for yourself.
4) Seek your potential – figure out what are you good at and then work on perfecting that.
5) Set high goals – there were medical papers claiming that the human heart will burst if a person runs a mile under 4 minutes. When the first guy succeeded 3 more did it in a few weeks. The lesson here is that you should be ambitious and aim high regardless of the conventional wisdom. Also – if you think your market is Germany or Austria (or Serbia) – it isn’t, it’s the whole world.
6) Relax under pressure – if you’re tense you will annoy people around you and you won’t enjoy yourself.
7) Attack pain – if you’re doing it right you will be in danger of burning out, your inner self will tell that you can’t do it anymore that you have to stop. The only way to combat this is that you cannot do it anymore. but you have to attack the pain.
8) Push the pace – race to the best of your ability from the get-go, every single day, never hold back. This is really important as a method of motivating your team.
9) Work as a team – in your startup you have to be a team, you cannot do it alone.
10) Run to win – if you run a race, if you run a business – run to win! It’s not a festival it’s a race. The spirit of the marathon is to do or die.
Mile 21: defeat the Wall – when you run out of physical ability, when you run into the wall. it will come, your preserverence is necessary.
Relentless Focus & Boring Consistency – the essence of building a business is <- that. you will have so many choices but you have to focus on the one thing that you want to build.
