Hey, I’m David. I help founders find the hidden value beneath the obvious problem.
I used to think that business was personal. After all, how can we separate ourselves from anything we do? It’s a bit like work-life balance. This is your life. It doesn’t matter if you’re at work or not.
Business is personal, I thought, because it involves people. I still believe that business is mostly about people. But I now see a distinction that matters. The distinction is one of identity.
It matters most when you make a mistake.
I remember many moments where I would make a mistake in my business and feel this immediate collapse of self. The size of the mistake wouldn’t always matter. Sometimes it would be something small, and then I would attach this huge meaning to it.
Like: I can’t believe I missed that.
I wasn’t thinking, “That decision didn’t work.”
I was thinking,
“Maybe I’m not good at this.”
“Maybe I’ll be found out.”
“Maybe they will hate me.” (Yes that extreme)
That is what happens when business becomes too personal. A mistake stops being information about an action and starts becoming a verdict on who you are.
But there is simply too much complexity in business for that to be useful.
You don’t have perfect awareness. You don’t have perfect vision. You are making decisions with incomplete information, around other people, inside changing conditions. Mistakes are going to happen all the time.
And if you take every mistake personally, you end up confusing who you are with one small effort or experiment that didn’t go perfectly.
That’s a dangerous thing to do.
To generalize your entire sense of self around one mistaken action.
Business isn’t personal in this specific sense: we are all doing things for the first time. We are learning as we go. Even when we know better, mistakes are still common. Trial and error is not a flaw in the process, it is the process.
Joe Hudson has a good way of describing this. In a piece for Lenny’s Newsletter, he writes that with enough reps,
“failure feels like information, not threat.”
The problem with taking business personally is that it makes trial and error feel unsafe.
If business is too personal, failure becomes a threat to who you are. If business is held properly, failure becomes information.
It tells you something about an action, an assumption, a system, a market, or an experiment. But it does not get to make a global claim about you. If failure is a key ingredient of success, then it is not a good process to see failure in an action as total failure in the global sense of who you are.
You want to be very careful about global beliefs about yourself.To be “a failure” is a devastating mindset for anyone. I didn’t even like writing that sentence down.
Seth Godin says, “If I fail more than you, I win.”
That’s a good belief.
This action failed.
This experiment failed.
This assumption failed.
Not: I am a failure/failing.
xx David
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