Starting up a company is a lot different than working for
somebody else for a living. When you're in the business of "that
hasn't been done before", there are a lot of mistakes to make. And
in some senses, growing a start-up is all about learning how your
business will work, by figuring out what won't work. The hard way.
By screwing it up the first time.
And that's why a short memory and a
long time-horizon is what makes an
entrepreneur.
A business that is already up and running has standard
procedures for dealing with the world. A way to service customers,
and a means to acquire new ones. A system for purchasing goods, and
back-ups in case one falls through. A way to finance the business,
and a plan to make returns for its shareholders.
Through time and prudence, established companies have found
their way to a set of policies, plans, procedures and programs that
make its businesses work well.
For a start-up, just the opposite is true. Nothing is
determined, nothing is time-tested, nothing has been molded by
trial and error into a workable trade-off.
The result is pain. Lots of it. In repeated, persistent,
capricious doses.
There's the marketing hire who gets away. The customer that
signs up and then has a change of heart. The contact you've been
buttering up for months at your potentially biggest game-changing
partner who gets canned the week before the final meeting. The
vaporware that the 800-pound gorilla announces to a gullible press
that sucks the air out of your momentum and buzz. The thousand of
ways that things can go wrong, big and small (usually both), that
distract, depress, and discourage the mere mortal at the heart of
the entrepreneurial venture.
I know they say that success has a thousand fathers and failure
is an orphan; but then whoever is siring the little bastard is one
promiscuous fella, because start-ups do nothing but create failure
after failure.
Succeeding at a start-up is not, then, about being prescient
enough, smart enough, and experienced enough to never make
mistakes, but rather it is about learning why it
went wrong -- both the symptom and the ultimate cause -- and
rebuilding your business to be stronger in light of it. And the
faster you make your mistakes, the quicker you'll take your lessons
from them. That's how you learn.
So an important part of being an entrepreneur is
forgetting.
They say that women's bodies produce a drug to forget the pain
of pregnancy after they give birth, and maybe the entrepreneur's
experience parrots that.
There are so many painful experiences in the course of a
start-up's life that it's a wonder anybody voluntarily does it at
all. The odds are bad, the pay is atrocious, the chances for
advancement dubious, and the world is dead-set against you when it
isn't ignoring you.
A typical person on a typical day would consider any one of
these indignities worthy of surrender.
And that's why a short memory -- forgetting yesterday's pain
while remembering the lesson that came with it -- is what makes for
a successful entrepreneur. Because dwelling on the embarrassments,
humiliations, and failures that happened before today's sunrise
will do nothing to make you more successful by today's sunset.
Yep, a start-up is all about let-down and heartbreaks. And
getting to success requires a mind that always forgets.
[Read Entry] 
It's important to 
My brother is a marathon
runner who recently had his best time ever in the New York City
Marathon. He's got a hectic full-time job and he's middle aged, so
it was a really big accomplishment. He spends a lot of time
training and staying in shape.
I'd like to expand our collection of cover
letters, resumes, CVs, and other employment-related letters. If you
have a cover letter, resignation letter, thank you letter or other
job search related letter, resume or curriculum vitae that you're
proud of, I'd like to consider adding it to our samples.
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