It's Not How Hard You Work: Only Results Matter

9:00 am - Mon, May 11, 2009: 98 notes

It’s Not How Hard You Work: Only Results Matter

“There is only one factor that matters. Results. That’s the difference between being an entrepreneur vs. being a rank-and-file employee is being rewarded for results (ownership) vs. being rewarded for punching the clock alone (a paycheck). Obsessive/addictive work habits can lead to results, but they don’t guarantee them - and under certain conditions, they inhibit them.”

— Greg Battle, Leftover Takeout

So that was my good friend Greg Battle’s response to my sketch called “Am I Fit for Startups?” where I emphasized passion and teamwork as trademark qualities of people I value in a startup environment.

Earlier parts of Greg’s rebuttle incorrectly accused me of valuing time, because I both mentioned “3am” and starting to dream “1 hour” before waking up. There he focused on the wrong thing, because both were actually indications of something much more important in startups: passion.

(I was up ‘till 3am because I was passionate about the work, and I dream about the work because the passion has entered the subconscious.)

Passion is a key ingredient of entrepreneurial success, but what is it?

Passion is intensity. Passion is the need to leave no stone left unturned. Passion is knowing your strengths and leveraging them. Perhaps most importantly:

Passion activates the hypersensitivity to see market nuances, and the energy to act.

In fact, the manifestation of this passion — entrepreneurial mania — is something I think is both healthy and necessary for success; and, in my anecdotal research, I don’t believe you can succeed without it.

Taking a quick look at the success stories of our time, we can create a long list of highly successful entrepreneurs who were passionate and therefore manic:

Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry & Sergy, Richard Branson, the list goes on…

But can anyone name a successful entreprneuer who wasn’t passionate and manic? While the concept of “entreprneurial mania” makes sense, when you stop and think about it — and stop defending the non-manic — an example of successful “entrepreneurial dispassion” doesn’t come easily.

So, sorry Greg, and other nay-sayers, I won’t apologize. My standards stand: Must Have Passion. And yes, that means you must be driven to stay up past your bedtime and you must dream about it in those wee hours of the morning.

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gbattle’s response:

Nate-

Sorry for the delayed response - this was sitting in my drafts and I forgot it was there.

I’ll start with my favorite quote on passion that I repeat all the time and captures the essense of your argument:

“One person with passion is better than forty people merely interested.” - E. M. Forster

Nowhere in my post did I argue against the benefits of hard work. But also, nowhere above did you acknowledge my point that the only reasonable measure of entrepreneurial fitness are the results, for which, I provided a replacement statement for your decision tree:

“I believe that as both a stakeholder and shareholder, I can produce results that incrementally enhance product/service value for our customers, and I’m committed to holding my colleagues (“we”) to that same belief such that our collective results mark significant positive change.”

At the end of the day, no matter how hard you worked, no matter how passionate and driven you are, those are simply causes. What were the effects? Is your organization focused on increasing peoples passion level, or are they focused on results and only the results.

Also, I didn’t conflate passion with mania as you have above. They are different, as evidenced by other commonly held over-passionate states like myopia, group think, megalomania, OCD, schizophrenia, analysis paralysis, etc. that may or may not enhance/undermine results. Does the distinction really matter if the entrepreneur is a success? Not one bit.

For every Gates, Jobs and Branson you hold up as exhibit A, B & C, how many equally or even more passionate, hard-working failures can I present? Countless, as could almost anyone. Statistically speaking, most startups fail, but do you believe they failed because they weren’t passionate enough or because they didn’t produce results that resonated in the marketplace? Show me a post-mortem by a failed startup CEO where he says “we weren’t passionate enough” and I’ll show you 100X more failed startup CEO’s stating “despite our passion, we didn’t produce results.”

The danger lies in confusing having an abundance of energy for producing measurable value in the marketplace.

Hard work and passion don’t necessarily unlock the mysteries of the marketplace as you’ve presented. In a sea of everchanging information, one can easily be hypersensitive to the exact wrong information leading to the wrong results. Passion without insight is a fool’s errand. It’s important to pay attention to the right signals and wherever that guidance came from - divine intervention, luck, working 25/8/366, Ms. Cleo, Xenu - is almost immaterial. This is the wisdom behind pithy statements like “work smarter, not harder” and “I’d rather be lucky than smart (or passionate) any day.”

Don’t confuse hard work with attention to detail.

It’s amazing how people attribute their success to passion and hardwork and their failures to exogenous factors. Success is like a magic trick, but there’s no such thing as magic, just magicians and other people’s perceptions [yes, I relate a lot of things to magic]. We’d rather misdirect people away from our dumb luck and serendipitous timing and point toward those efforts, however important or unimportant, which we can control as the main driver of success - “Hey everybody, look what I did!” We crave to feel empowered, but no investor, fanboy or customer wants to hear the real story:

The truth is that skill is indistinguishable from luck after the fact.

Again, I’m not arguing against working hard (and I never would) or even passion, myopia, or megalomania. I am arguing against the fallacy of hard work alone as the standard for entrepreneurial fitness. The market isn’t a meritocracy. The market doesn’t look at when you punched the clock. The market doesn’t reward people who work hard and come up short. The market is ammoral and unforgiving. Nobody cares whether it took you 6 all-nighters or 6 milliseconds to make the decision, you get what you deserve based upon the outcome. The market doesn’t discern the difference between passion and indifference, luck and skill, and stupid and smart when it comes to getting the right results. It’s very Machievellian - either you got it right, or you did not get it right. Period. The true measure of entrepreneurial fitness is whether you can live with these truisms despite your absolute best efforts.

“One lucky idiot is better than forty wildly passionate people.” - Greg Battle

I submit to you Nate, it’s time to get passionate about getting lucky. ;-)