What Entrepreneurs can Learn from Yoda
By Jennifer Schweers and Bruce Firestone
It turns out that Yoda and the Jedi Knights can teach entrepreneurs quite a bit. No, they can’t teach us to ‘use the force’ to pry money out of reluctant bankers or VCs or ‘convince’ customers to buy more of our products and services. But read this exchange below between Yoda and Luke Sywalker and think for a minute what an entrepreneur should see in it.
Here is the setting: Luke is visiting Yoda to master Jedi techniques but he longs to cut short his learning so he can get off planet and save his friends who are (or soon will be) in trouble with the Empire but his x-wing fighter has become stuck in the marsh. Yoda has told Luke to use the force to raise the fighter from the muck but Luke has complained that it is “too big”.
“OK, I’ll give it a try,” says Luke.
“Do, or do not. There is no ‘try’,” Master Yoda responds.
So Luke does give it a try. He manages to move the fighter a bit but ultimately, he fails.
Then as Luke is walking away in disgust and despair that he will never leave the Planet, Yoda raise the X-wing fighter and gently deposits it next to Luke.
“I don’t believe it!” says Luke.
“That is why you fail,” Yoda says with a look of disappointment in his erstwhile promising protégé.
Master Yoda with a
Typical Look of Disapproval
I think there are two main lessons we as entrepreneurs can learn from this:
- If you don’t believe you will succeed, you won’t.
- No one in the world cares how hard you try in business—not your banker, your investors, your suppliers, your customers, your shareholders, your employees—they only care if you succeed.
If you ask an elite athlete, say a gymnast, how they prepare for a major match, they almost all will tell you that they visualize their routines and they visualize themselves winning the competition too. They do this over and over and, finally, they go out there to perform, sometimes in front of an audience of thousands and a television audience of millions.
The champions just do this better than anyone else and they can ‘bring it’ on the crucial day of the match. That is, they can call up peak performance at the right time. Entrepreneurs need to be able to perform at a high level every day over extended periods of time.
That is a necessary condition but not a sufficient condition for success. The other part is that they have to perform every day with a belief in their own inevitable success—when things are darkest, they must still be able to pull everyone around them forward with absolute belief.
Have you ever tried to sell someone something you didn’t believe in yourself? Right, it is impossible unless you are a con artist. Those people rely on others’ greed and gullibility. Entrepreneurs can never do that—they need to create a sustainable business based on relationships with suppliers, financiers, customers, in fact, a whole business eco system that is long term and based on mutual respect, trust and even friendship. “People like to buy from people they like and trust.”
Lastly, if you want to have a short, pleasant annual meeting with your banker, show a profit every year. They won’t care that you made 100s of phone calls to prospective clients; they won’t care how hard you tried to sell to them successfully or how close you came to raising your ‘x-wing fighter’. All they are going to care about is how much money you made.
There are no excuses in the life of an entrepreneur—do, or do not; there is no ‘try’.
http://www.dramatispersonae.org/EntrepreneurialistCultureFrontPage.htm