January 4, 2026
It’s business, not personal.
Starting a new business is really hard. Think about everything it takes to start an everyday business like a café. Picking a location, buying silverware, securing a credit line, designing a logo, hiring staff. It goes on and on.
And that’s for a business that is already very well-understood.
The businesses I foolishly try to create are software startups. Here the risk is 10x greater. Our market doesn’t know who we are yet. They also don’t know that the type of thing we offer even exists. It’s a completely new category that they’ve never considered before.
In other words, it’s not enough to build something compelling. We also need to educate the market that this new thing, that they’re hearing about for the first time, is valuable and that they need to start paying for it. That’s so much harder!
Making this happen is a long process with a lot of different steps. And some (most!) of these steps end up not working. And when we pour our heart and soul into every single aspect of what we do (we don’t know any other way), a rejection from the market can feel devastating. If we fail two or three times in a row, it feels like we’re never going to succeed.
But what I keep reminding myself is that we absolutely cannot take it personally. We can (and probably will) make a ton of things that just won’t work. And if we take a failure, big or small, and make it about us and our abilities, then we’re going to lose momentum, slow down and give up.
What we should do instead is flex the resilience muscle. That’s the muscle that lets us breathe in, divorce ourselves from emotion, dust ourselves off and try something else.
Being resilient is like a superpower. If you keep on trying and iterating through the failures, once in a while, you end up doing something that does work. And then you repeat it, and you get something that really works. And then you’re on your way.