PREPARE FOR THE WEATHER
WE START MOVEMENTS because we want to see big change, and that most likely involves overcoming big obstacles. One way to help get past obstacles is to remember that they are coming. There’s a slide I use in a lot of presentations and talks that I give. On one side of the slide there’s a picture of a grassy mountain on a sunny day, and I show a line pointing near the top, to the word “me.” On the other side there’s a photo of a steep, dangerous mountain on a dark and stormy day, and I show a line pointing to the very bottom, where it also reads “me.”
This is how I describe to people what it feels like to be an entrepreneur. It’s also how it feels to be a leader of any team or any movement. Either you’re near the top of the mountain and it’s sunny and you’ve brought a picnic lunch, or you’re down at the bottom, with a storm brewing, carrying a heavy pack, and you’re not sure you’ll ever get to the top. These two metaphorical days rotate all the time. The highs and lows are in a constant state of flux. You don’t suddenly and miraculously get past all the punishing challenges and reach eternal sunshine every day after that. Rather, it’s a never-ending cycle of sunny to cloudy to sunny to cloudy, and hopefully back to sunny again.
CREDIT FOR SUNNY MOUNTAIN SIDE: GUILHELM VELLUT
CREDIT FOR STORMY MOUNTAIN SIDE: AU_EARS
The key to success is holding on to the belief that you’ll have more sunny days than cloudy ones and to just keep climbing, every day, no matter what. Great leaders not only keep climbing on both types of days but also inspire their teams to climb with them. Because there will always be cloudy days, we should expect them, prepare for them, and surround ourselves with resources to get through them. Those cloudy days won’t last forever, though; sunny days will come again and we should appreciate them when they do. It’s important to keep climbing on the sunny days, too, and not to stop too long for the picnic lunch. Otherwise someone may come up behind you and pass you up.
When I led The Dealmap, there were many cloudy days. I often felt like the company was going to fail, especially in the first couple of years as a startup when we had to change the product and even the name of the company several times. And then more frequently, and especially after we finally hit on the right idea, we’d have days when it felt like the company was going to be awesome. Back and forth. Up and down. Highs and lows.
Ben Silbermann’s Venn Diagram
ALT SUMMIT
Ben Silbermann, the founder and CEO of Pinterest, has described this type of entrepreneurial leadership as the intersection between terror and joy, as he showed in the following slide from a keynote he gave in 2012 at the Alt Summit in Salt Lake City.
I can relate. It’s certainly not all rainbows and unicorns, and part of getting through the challenges is to be honest with each other that they exist so we don’t feel so alone when we face them. If we can recognize that every other leader is facing the same fears and anxiety, then ours won’t feel so bad. And as we’ll see later in this chapter, often the challenges themselves have value—they make us stronger, and each one makes us more capable of handling the next. Plus, if you enjoy the process, you’re inspired by the people you’re working with, and you believe in what you’re doing, then those sunny days of belief and persistence will help you get past the much bleaker ones.
David Dodson, a lecturer at the Stanford Graduate School of Business whom I am lucky to work with in teaching a case study about some of my experiences, makes another great point about “mountain climbing.” He says, “The summit you will work so hard to reach only provides you with a better view of all the other mountains yet to climb.” It is indeed true that the act of overcoming challenges both helps you see others you have yet to tackle and makes you more capable of tackling them. So keep climbing the mountain, bring a team of people you want to climb with, and remember that you are not alone.
THE ROCKY MOMENT
I’M A SUCKER for movies. And I mean really a sucker. I cry during nearly every movie I watch, including the animated ones, which is a running joke in my family. And I have a tendency to get so deeply pulled into the plot that my friends have seen me do ridiculous things like clap in the theater for a performance on film, or even wave good-bye to a character who is waving on-screen. I suppose it’s because I truly believe in the power of art to tell stories and for those stories to teach lessons that are valuable in life.
So it’s no surprise that I am especially inspired by those moments in movies and theater when someone is down and pulls themselves back up. I call it the Rocky Moment. You’ve lost one round, or two, or maybe every fight up until now, but you work harder, throw everything you have into it, get support and inspiration from others around you, and come back to win against the fiercest competitor. Or The Martian Moment, when you face a seemingly insurmountable challenge like bringing a stranded astronaut back from Mars before he dies, so you pull a talented team together, stumble through lots of failed ideas, and at the last possible minute, you come up with the one idea that just might work.
I believe these moments happen offscreen, too, in our daily lives. Some of them are just as dramatic as in the movies—from life-saving surgeries, to last-minute Hail Mary passes in professional sports, to feats of science that break new barriers, to campaigns that make massive global policy change. And some of these moments are smaller, like succeeding on a test we didn’t think we’d pass or getting funding for a project we thought no one would support. Big or small, we all have those Rocky Moments when we work hard and achieve something no one thought was possible, sometimes not even ourselves.
It’s not to say that there won’t be failures along the way. In fact, the very premise of a Rocky Moment is that failures must come before success. If it isn’t hard enough to warrant failures in the process of getting there, then it’s likely not a big enough challenge. But as F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “You mustn’t confuse a single failure with a final defeat.” We can look at these smaller failures in our lives not as final defeat but rather as part of the path to ultimate success, and we can learn from those failures along the way to make us stronger and increase our chances of achieving our ultimate goal. To quote Rocky Balboa himself, “It ain’t about how hard you hit. It’s about how hard you can get hit and keep moving forward.” If we see our lives as a series of Rocky Moments, we might just surprise ourselves with what we are able to accomplish. And the harder the fight, the sweeter the victory.
FESTIVAL OF FAILURE
ONCE WE ACKNOWLEDGE that there will be many failures on our path, the question is what we do with them. And though it might be cliché (and is likely cliché for a reason), what we should be doing, of course, is learning from our failures. But is it possible to really go big when we learn from failure? I mean really kick the shit out of learning from failure? I believe it is. And the way to do that is to not just casually think, “Boy, that didn’t work,” but rather to dig in, understand and document exactly what didn’t work or why it didn’t work. And if you really want to take it to the next level, then the best way to do that is to share it. I don’t mean just mention it to someone else. I mean shout-it-from-the-rooftops share it, especially with people who are trying to solve the same problem as you. The more we know about each other’s failures, the less likely we are to repeat them, and the faster we’ll be able to move on toward finding solutions.
Thomas Edison is reported to have said, “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” And each of those 10,000 ways showed him something about what he might want to try or not try in the next experiment. He realized that he could get to solutions faster if he made mistakes faster and had more people working on the same problem. In fact, Edison’s laboratory in West Orange, New Jersey, was the first full-fledged research and development lab ever created. The speed of getting through failures to ultimate success led Edison to create 1,093 new U.S. patents—one for every two weeks of his working career. Edison and the team at his lab were the ultimate expression of the “fail fast” mentality that is now so common in Silicon Valley and other innovation hubs around the world.
At Change.org we destigmatized failure by instituting something called the “Festival of Failure,” a method to encourage people to share their failures in a way that others could learn from as well. It wasn’t formalized in one single way across the company. Instead, each team adapted the idea to its own workflow. Some global or functional teams had a Festival of Failure section in each weekly team call in which people chimed in with recent failure examples. The engineering team, whose members do demos with each other every week to show what they’ve been working on, would periodically have their own “Festival of Failure” demos to show examples of mistakes they made or code they broke and what they learned. The festivals highlight failure as a learning opportunity without shaming people for mistakes. They help us recognize that we all have failures, especially when we are trying to do ambitious things. There is no shame in that. The only shame is in not sharing the failures we make so others can learn from and avoid them.
IT’S ONLY FAILURE IF YOU GO HOME
IN MY OWN experience as a startup founder, I learned in painful detail that failure is a necessary part of the process of building something. After nearly ten years moving up in the ranks at Yahoo!, I wanted to see if I could build a company from the ground up—a product that would solve an important user need, an outstanding team, and an inspiring company culture. I wanted to try my hand at being a CEO. While I was excited for the challenge, I had my fair share of apprehension. I knew that the possibility of failure with startups was extremely high. In fact, I remember reading a statistic in The Book of Odds that said I was more likely to report seeing a UFO (one out of 5.8 U.S. adults) than for my startup company to succeed (depending on what source you use, between one out of seven and one out of ten). Many of the people I knew told me how surprised they were that I was leaving an executive position at Yahoo! to lead this small company that didn’t yet have a bulletproof product. I told myself rationally that even if I failed, I would be fine. I knew that with my previous experience I would be able to get another job afterward, so I wasn’t putting myself financially at risk. I also knew I had family and friends who would support me no matter what; even if my business failed, they wouldn’t see me as a failure. But while my rational mind said that all would be okay, there was still a nagging voice, deep inside, telling me I was afraid to fail. Nevertheless, my desire to build and create something new and to prove to myself I could at least give it a go won out.
So I jumped in. I joined a very small existing company rather than starting completely from scratch. I chose a company with people I thought I could learn from: incredible technical founder Chandu Thota, an engineer who had come from Microsoft, and experienced board chair Bill Harris, who had previously been the CEO of Intuit and PayPal. And I did learn so much from them and many others over the next several years. I also learned how hard it is to be an entrepreneur, and boy did I make a lot of mistakes, especially at the beginning.
When I first joined the company, a neighborhood social networking site called Fatdoor, I didn’t like the name since it was hard to understand and I thought unappealing with the word “fat” in it. But my decision to rename it Center’d was arguably much worse. Leaving out the third e (because we couldn’t afford to buy the domain with the proper spelling) and replacing it with an apostrophe was one of the worst ideas I’ve ever had. We couldn’t even use the possessive form of our name in a press release because it would have two apostrophes (“Center’d’s new product . . .”). The apostrophe is also what’s known as a “special character” in computer code, and it broke many features that we tried to build. Not only was the improper spelling a bad idea, but the name was also still unclear, so people did not know what we did or what we stood for. Really horrible decision all around. And one I would learn to correct in our final iteration of the product.
We had a vision of a world where people’s lives were rooted in their local neighborhoods, making their connections with their neighbors stronger and their lives more convenient. Although that vision was clear, it took numerous efforts to launch something that has what entrepreneurs and investors call “product/market fit.” This term means that you find a “good” (large and high-growth) market and have a product that can satisfy the needs of that market. We built three different products before ultimately finding one that had real product/market fit.
First up was Fatdoor, the neighborhood social networking product the team had built before I arrived. It had strong potential but was likely ahead of its time, as many tech products often are. When it was launched in 2007, it predated many of the foundational products upon which something like this would grow today, such as iPhone and Android apps, Facebook Connect (which allows people to log in to other sites with their Facebook credentials and carry their social graph with them), and other tools. So although the market was potentially large (all people wanting to connect in all neighborhoods), we had trouble reaching enough people in that market, which meant we couldn’t effectively connect people locally. It also had some issues with user data privacy. So we shut it down. Round 1: failure.
Then came Center’d, version 1. The first version of Center’d we launched aimed to leverage what we built at Fatdoor, connecting people in neighborhoods, and focus on a specific community within those neighborhoods: schools and parents. The product helped them organize around work that needed to be shared and distributed, like event planning and volunteering, to help make their lives more convenient. It also had built-in virality, because each person who used the tool automatically pulled in more people. While the potential for a big market of people was there, a critical enough user need wasn’t clear, so it wasn’t a high-growth market. We ended up selling off the pieces of this to another small startup. Round 2: failure.
In Center’d 2.0, we built on top of the location-based work we had done in the first two products to extend into local search. We believed that the world was going mobile; when people looked for local businesses, they would want to quickly discover key attributes without reading hundreds of reviews on their smartphones (especially when most places averaged about four stars anyway). To build in that convenience, we analyzed more than 40 million online reviews for local businesses and used sentiment analysis and machine learning to come up with summaries for businesses, similar to a Zagat score, but in an automated way. We could tell you whether a restaurant was romantic, or kid friendly, or good for groups. We could let you know the most commonly mentioned menu items, what people said about the service, and how clean the bathrooms were. It was a really good product, but we couldn’t get enough consumers to use it, and we had no real business model to make money to market it with because we couldn’t sell ads in it unless people used it. Chicken and egg. We did find a set of customers who were really interested in the data we had—other local directories and search companies—and they wanted to pay us for the data. So we sold it to them, and started making money. Awesome! Until we realized we had already sold it to most of the largest potential customers. Meaning that we didn’t have a sufficiently large market. Round 3: better, but still likely a failure.
At each of these junctures, I could have called it quits. Many people might have. I often say in retrospect that the company failed three times, but we just didn’t go home. When the U.S. banks were being referred to as “too big to fail” in 2008 and 2009, we called ourselves “too stubborn to fail.” Many people might have returned the remaining capital to investors and called it a day. And while I certainly felt anxiety and plenty of self-doubt in that moment, I didn’t want to give up. We knew we had the right team, that the vision to improve people’s local lives was worthwhile, and that the underlying tech had real potential. I thought back to all the research I had done running local and marketplace businesses at Yahoo! and what people had told us they felt was missing. One of the consistent unmet needs we heard from people was that they wanted to know about sales and deals nearby. That was it, our eureka moment. We decided to build our fourth product—The Dealmap—which took all the robust data we had about local businesses and added a layer that showed which businesses were having a sale or special offer at the time. We launched The Dealmap right as the local deals ecosystem around Groupon was taking off, and because we were able to map both local, Groupon-style deals and sales from national brands (like Gap) to their local stores, we had a superior product. While any local deals service might have a dozen or so deals in each city on a given day, we would have thousands. This was an idea that became a movement—people were passionate about it because it not only made their lives in their neighborhoods more convenient but also helped them save money that then could be put toward other valuable things. And unlike its predecessors, The Dealmap tapped into consumers’ universal desire to save money. The product took off like wildfire after we launched it, acquiring millions of users in the first year. Companies like Mastercard and Microsoft reached out to work with us. It was a lightbulb moment for me in terms of what product/market fit actually looked like.
To use a Silicon Valley term in the zeitgeist: we embraced the pivot rather than accepting failure. And it worked.
Even though we were able to ultimately find success, what I’ve highlighted so far is just an inkling of the challenges we faced along the way. It was quite a tall mountain to climb. While there were many sunny days, there were also plenty of cloudy ones. In fact, even after we had a product that worked, in a market that was large, it didn’t mean there were no more obstacles. We were sued by patent trolls, had to navigate a board that was split between taking more funding and selling the company, and had to rescue our acquisition by Google after it nearly fell apart thirty-six hours before it was supposed to close (and after my whole team knew about it and was packed up in boxes).
At each of those moments I just thought to myself, “Okay, how can I take one more step up the mountain?” And one by one, we did solve each challenge. I negotiated additional agreements when necessary, and we changed the structure of the Google acquisition. We did what it took to make it work. I am reminded of one of my favorite quotes: Pat Summitt, the late, beloved women’s basketball coach from the University of Tennessee and the former coach of Robin Roberts, is famous for saying, “Left foot, right foot, breathe.” Just keep moving. Solve each challenge that comes up, and eventually success will be within your grasp.
FIND YOUR ALLIES
WHEN THE MOUNTAIN feels high, remember that you don’t have to climb it by yourself. Even if you start out as a solitary voice fighting for change, the people you rally around to support your movement can help you tackle obstacles, too. That’s what Olga Rybkovskaya did when she successfully petitioned the Russian Ministry of Health to change its laws that had previously prohibited family from visiting relatives in intensive care units. Many of the people who signed her petition shared their personal stories on Change.org, and Olga collected those moving and powerful narratives and used their voices to encourage other signers to do the same. Marshaling her supporters and shaping them into a group of volunteers, including lawyers and psychologists who could help draft new proposed guidelines and directives, would turn out to be the most powerful aspect of her campaign. “I realized that many people need legal assistance and that among my signers there were lawyers,” she told me. “I published the update suggesting we start a group of lawyers. A group of thirty signers responded immediately to this ask. I started a closed group on Facebook, and within a few days, as a result of ‘brainstorming,’ the volunteer lawyers in the group created a full package of the important and useful documents. Now the group still exists and my signers are still in touch with one another.”
AND AMANDA NGUYEN, whom we met earlier, was passionate about fighting for the rights of sexual abuse survivors, but she also realized she couldn’t do it alone. The first step she took toward finding allies in her movement to get the law changed was small but extremely powerful. She sent an e-mail to everyone she knew—colleagues, friends, professors—“asking people to walk with me in a vision of changing the Massachusetts bill. I said, ‘This is what I want to do. Will you stand with me and help me?’” Sharing her story wasn’t easy, but she knew it was an important part of changing how we talk about sexual assault. “Rape is still stigmatic for the survivor. When I see my name and the word ‘rape’ next to it, it’s not a good feeling,” she told me. “But I also see and hear from people across America and across the world about how much this means to them and how much of a difference it’s made in their lives. That’s why I keep doing it and keep putting myself out there and being vulnerable and authentic to the story that I’m trying to tell, my story, and the fight that I’m trying to get others to see. At the end of the day, that’s what’s important.”
And people did respond—everyone from lawyers to coders to comedians asked Amanda how they could help. When Amanda founded Rise, she mobilized the forces she needed to fight for change on state and national levels. One of the many extraordinary things about the people who work at Rise is that most of them are volunteers—offering their services and various forms of expertise for free to a cause and movement they believe in. “Rise is like the Uber of activism,” she told me. “The Rise model of advocacy is a share economy of professional skills for making change. Do you want to change your country in your spare time? Well, we’ve done that. There’s zero excuse for anybody who says, ‘Oh, I just don’t have the capacity to do something full-time.’ We had economists and people who make a living doing financial projects on Wall Street, who work crazy hours, but when we needed them to calculate regression for certain districts of a member of Congress, they spent two hours and we were able to produce that memo for that member. Our greatest assets were people, their stories and their backgrounds, their different professional skills and talents.”
She also found allies in others who were survivors of sexual assault. Amanda started a Change.org petition, and as more than 140,000 people signed and wrote their reasons for supporting her, many people shared their own stories of survival. In fact, Amanda later raised money on Change.org to fly more than twenty of these fellow survivors to D.C. to tell their stories in person to members of Congress. And as we saw in Chapter 4, Amanda and her allies won, passing the federal law in just seven months. While getting the federal law passed is an enormous step forward, it is still just partway up the mountain Amanda and her allies are climbing. Each state has different laws, and many of the rights are not protected in every state. So Amanda is taking the movement to each state now as well, and many more survivors are starting campaigns in their home states. As of this writing, this incredible volunteer team has already passed the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Bill of Rights in twelve states over the past six months.
SURROUND YOURSELF WITH PEOPLE WHO HOLD YOU UP (AND ACCOUNTABLE)
PARTNERS ARE THE ultimate allies. Amy Norman and Stella Ma cofounded Little Passports in 2008 after meeting in their jobs as category managers at eBay. Becoming entrepreneurs wasn’t something they initially planned to do, but they were passionate about making a difference and felt that their work didn’t make enough of an impact. As Stella told me, “I had been frustrated with corporate America, with not feeling like my work was having enough impact on the world. I couldn’t look back and see how I had changed anything for the better.” So they set off together as cofounders and co-CEOs to build Little Passports with the mission to raise a generation of global citizens. Little Passports offers a range of subscription products that inspire kids ages three to twelve to learn about the world by sending them packages in the mail each month that teach them about a different country or topic. All of the subscriptions are sent by characters, essentially “pen pals,” who are traveling the world.
More than nine years later, Little Passports is a successful, high-growth, profitable company (nearly doubling in size every year), adding new products and inspiring kids around the globe. But to reach this point, Stella and Amy faced enormous challenges. And I mean enormous—both professionally and personally—that they had to overcome. And having each other really helped. I have been a board member at Little Passports since 2009 and have witnessed their incredible determination firsthand.
“The weekend that we founded the company, my marriage fell apart unexpectedly,” Amy told me. “And I was eight months pregnant with my second child. Then my dad got diagnosed with cancer, and he died within four months. So, there I was, this single mom with no salary. I had just lost my dad, who was one of my best support systems, and we were trying to get this company off the ground. We literally had just launched; we didn’t have any capital raised yet. And it took a huge amount of commitment and perseverance to stick with it, and this utmost belief in ourselves.”
Amy went on to explain that for her, the company has always represented a tremendous sense of hope that came out of what was the absolute worst period of her life, and how having Stella there as her co-CEO made an enormous difference: “Stella has absolutely been the support system for me during those times. That stabilizing voice. I remember her bringing me into her home for Thanksgiving when I had nowhere else to go. And those are just memories that you never forget. And so, our business friendship is completely intertwined with our personal friendship. And it’s an amazing feeling, all this time later, to have made it work out.”
Stella, in turn, told me about one of the many times when Amy was there to support her through a difficult challenge: “Amy and I started out as best friends, and have really endured through the years. She was there to support me when I gave birth prematurely to my younger son and he was in the hospital for close to three months shortly after we had launched the business. Amy was there to support me both professionally and personally. That was really critical.”
This combination of the belief in their business, their belief in themselves, and their belief in each other was key to getting them through the many obstacles and moments that felt like they might lead to failure, and being able to turn them around. They have managed not only to survive these tremendous personal challenges but also to overcome many tough times in the business itself—times when they couldn’t raise capital and were afraid they couldn’t pay their employees, times when they were changing warehouses and one company threatened to not release their inventory to them—and they got through these challenges together.
They tackled each potential failure point one by one, supporting each other through those tough moments, knowing they had each other to count on when they needed it, and feeling responsible to do their best for each other. They broke down the work into the areas where they each had the most expertise, and they trusted each other to each run their own areas—for Amy it was marketing and financial management, and for Stella it was product development and operations. And the biggest decisions about how to evolve their strategy, whether to launch new products or whether to work with certain investors, etc., they made together. This partnership has strengthened the company and helped them navigate to ultimate success. Little Passports is now on track to do more than $30 million in revenue and is growing quickly. And they have built a movement of passionate fans who love their brand and subscribe to multiple new products as they launch them.
IT MAY SOUND obvious, but this technique of surrounding yourselves with other people who both support you and will hold you accountable is hugely effective in many parts of our lives. In fact, research shows that the simple act of sharing your goals with someone else makes you more likely to achieve them. In a 2015 study, Dr. Gail Matthews at Dominican University of California recruited 267 people from a variety of backgrounds and industries and asked them to take various actions on business-related goals they hoped to accomplish within a four-week block. Participants were randomly assigned to one of five groups with varying levels of commitment, starting with just “thinking” about their goals and rating them on different dimensions, and then increasing in additional commitments by writing down the goals, by writing down the goals and the action commitments, by doing all of the above and sharing action commitments with a friend, and finally by doing all of those steps while also sending a weekly progress report to a friend. Examples of the specific goals ranged from writing a chapter of a book to listing and selling a house.
At the end of the study, participants were asked to rate their progress and the degree to which they had accomplished their goals. Matthews found that more than 70 percent of the participants who sent weekly updates to a friend and 62 percent of those who shared action commitments with a friend reported successful goal achievement (completely accomplishing their goal or were more than halfway there), compared with 35 percent of those who kept their goals to themselves without writing them down, and 43 percent of those who wrote down their goals but didn’t share them with others.
There are many examples of people having more success in reaching their goals when they feel supported by and accountable to others, everything from quitting smoking to losing weight and more. Recently a few friends of mine set up their own “support and accountability” circle of sorts with the goal of getting back in shape. They each made a plan to exercise four times a week, every week. Immediately after their workouts, they would text the others with a line or two about what the workout was. The others often, but not always, would then respond with encouragement. For any week when they didn’t reach their goal of four workouts, the penalty was an extra seventy-five burpees (squat plus push-up plus frog jump plus jump squat) the following week, which, just as it sounds, is no fun.
At the end of one year, they estimate that they each missed only three to four weeks out of the more than fifty weeks since they made the deal. Two of them are in the best shape of their lives, and one says he’s “close.” The constant text reminders have been incredibly helpful, and the micro-goals that are week-to-week focused and not monthly or annual helped lead to a regular cadence of exercise. Even when they are traveling or otherwise out of their regular routine, this system has helped to actively encourage them to make a plan to get their four workouts in, and it nearly always works. They didn’t even need to be in the same location—in this case one was in New York, one was in California, and one was in Australia—they could support each other across continents. And as a bonus, they’ve become even better friends because they are in touch day to day.
As you consider how to maximize your chances of success, think about those people you can partner with closely, who will support and encourage you in the tough times, and to whom you will feel accountable, giving yourself that extra push to tackle the challenges you will face.
DO THE WORK
MANY TIMES, MOVEMENTS and new businesses succeed through the sheer force of hunkering down and doing the hard work that comes with navigating challenges and starting something big. Creating something from nothing takes sweat equity—it isn’t easy, and we shouldn’t expect it to be. And you often don’t have the resources you think you need to be successful, which means everyone involved needs to work harder, do more, and get by by being scrappy. But the work is worth it, and the scrappiness is worth it, and honestly, most big businesses and movements all have these same humble beginnings and just wouldn’t have been successful without them.
It’s no coincidence that many of the biggest tech companies from HP to Google are known for beginning in garages; when I first started Breakthrough in Pittsburgh we had just two rooms to work out of as our office, one of which was a closet, which we lovingly called the “cloffice.” I worked so late every day that first year that I always carried around a shopping list in my pocket because I could never get to the store, which closed at 9:00 p.m. (Not a great way to set a leadership example, I know, and I later learned to prioritize a bit better.) But the truth is, in those early days of starting something, you often just have to do the work. And sometimes, the better things go, the more work there is to do, at least until you can adjust to the scale.
Alli Webb and Michael Landau at Drybar saw this in the weeks before they opened their first retail store. At first the bookings trickled in—they’d get an e-mail every few hours and everyone would get excited. But everything changed when DailyCandy ran the feature about them. Suddenly, while they were all at lunch together, their phones started buzzing: appointment notifications were pouring in. A week later, with eight styling chairs but only five stylists, they would be, as Michael told me, “thrown to the wolves.” They had completely underestimated the demand. In the early days it was almost comical—Michael and Alli and both of their spouses would be in the shop until two in the morning, trying to figure out their systems and get ready for the next day. “It was pandemonium. Even a couple of months in, Alli was in this back room trying to do payroll, and trying to plan her schedule, and there were stylists literally on top of her,” Michael said. “So I rented a one-bedroom apartment just behind the shop in Brentwood. My wife and I lived in Orange County, so we would come up on Monday, spend the week there, and Alli would come over from the shop and use that apartment to hear herself think, and do payroll, and do the schedule.” Gradually they started hiring people and eventually they got a real office.
Even Alli—who was not only helping to run the business but also working with customers, doing hair—was shocked by how hard it was to keep up: “I didn’t hire a manager because we didn’t know how big this thing was going to be,” she told me. “I was doing blowout after blowout and helping to manage the shop. And we had promoted ‘Pop-ins welcome’ on all of our material, so people were constantly coming in and getting mad because we were just too busy for that. On top of everything, when we first opened in Brentwood we had a phone at the front desk, but we couldn’t answer the phone because we were so busy, and it was so loud with all the blow-dryers and the music. We very quickly realized that if we answered the phone, we were giving everybody a bad experience: the person standing in front of us for sure, and the person on the phone could barely hear us. That’s how we ended up in the call center business, which we didn’t plan. It was like catching our breath and trying to figure everything out at the same time. We just didn’t expect it to take off so quickly the way it did. We were all crying the first day; it was insane.”
In the end, as Michael says, it all comes down to just getting the work done. “Do not let ‘perfect’ get in the way of progress. Everything that is involved in growing a business is so hard, but you have to just be able to plow down, and get shit done.”
PUT OBSTACLES IN PERSPECTIVE
AS IS TRUE for many of us, it took a few dramatic events in my life to massively change my outlook and help me put other challenges in perspective. We’ve already talked about Emma’s accident, which was one of those events, but the first seismic shift in perspective took place eight years earlier, when I was in my late twenties.
My husband, Len, and I met in Pittsburgh, where he is from and where I had moved to start the Breakthrough program. We got married about two years later, and shortly after our wedding we started business school together, where we enjoyed two wonderful years at Cornell.
I had started having regular, fairly serious headaches around that time, but being young and busy, I really didn’t give them much thought except to assume that I might have some kind of chronic sinus infection, since the pain I experienced was almost always right behind my eyes. We were focused on school and on each other, and it was a great time in our lives. Len is almost ten years older than me, and since he was then in his midthirties, he was ready to start having kids. Although I was younger, I had always known that I wanted to be a mother, and for some reason I’ve always had a healthy sense of fear about taking life’s possibilities for granted, so I agreed. We might as well start trying now, I said at only twenty-six, because you never know what might happen.
We started trying to get pregnant, unsuccessfully, during our second year of business school, and after graduation we moved to Palo Alto, both for jobs in tech in the very early days of the dotcom boom. I went to see a new doctor in Palo Alto to try to get to the bottom of what I thought were fertility problems. At my second appointment, my doctor said the results of my blood work had shown some unusual hormone levels, and she suggested I should have a brain MRI.
For some reason, I honestly didn’t think about why she might have prescribed that test at the time; maybe it was because I was young and naive, or maybe because it wasn’t yet common to search every detail of every possible ailment on the Internet. Either way, all I know is that I was really unprepared for the news that lay ahead.
A few days later my doctor called. I was at work, so I took the call in one of the only private spaces I could find at Yahoo!’s open-plan offices—a glass conference room. As soon as I picked up the phone, she said rather abruptly: “We got your MRI back. You have a brain tumor and you need to call a neurosurgeon right away.”
A brain tumor? I completely lost it.
Thoughts were racing through my head, and I remember feeling so scared and so confused. “How will I find a neurosurgeon? Does the fact that she said I need to call them right away mean that I am dying?”
Everyone could see me crying through the glass as I tried to process the news. I remember thinking: “How am I going to get out of here? Who am I going to have to talk to on my way out of the office so that I can leave?” Knowing what I now knew, I couldn’t imagine staying at work for the rest of the day, but I didn’t want to leave, either, not wanting to shirk my responsibilities as I was so new in my job—I had started working there full-time only one month earlier after having interned the previous summer. I remember finding my manager and telling him what was going on and how he encouraged me to go home. Though I wasn’t a manager yet, this experience gave me valuable perspective for when I did become one and later a leader of a company. The empathy and sense of calm that my manager had for me on that day meant so much to me, and I have tried to replicate his kindness in the years since when others I work with are going through challenging times.
The day I found out about my brain tumor, I went home to try to process the news, and over the course of the following week, I learned more about my diagnosis and what my treatment options were. I had (and still have) what’s called a pituitary adenoma, a slow-growing tumor that is usually benign and, as it turns out, fairly common. At the time, though, neither of those mitigating factors made my situation any less scary to me. However, I was both extremely scared and quite grateful—while my tumor was large and the surgical procedure incredibly involved and complex, it wasn’t cancer. As long as the surgery went well, it was likely that I’d be fine.
Suddenly, too, all those years of headaches made sense. And here I was, about to have complex surgery on my brain, a young married woman, with no children, at nearly the same age the same thing had happened to my mother—twenty-seven.
It turned out that I was extremely lucky because the man who was likely the world’s best surgeon for this type of tumor just happened to be in San Francisco. In fact, this doctor, Charlie Wilson, had been featured just two months before my surgery in a New Yorker article about “physical genius” by Malcolm Gladwell, who likened him to the Yo-Yo Ma or Wayne Gretzky of neurosurgery.
My tumor was getting quite large, and it was right up against my optic nerve, so there really was no other choice than to have the surgery: without it, the tumor would continue to grow and could cause blindness and other problems. Once I agreed to it, the surgery was scheduled. I would have to wait four weeks for the earliest available date.
It was a very frightening several weeks waiting for the surgery. I was afraid of so many things. What if I woke up in the middle of the surgery? What if something went wrong and I wasn’t the same person afterward in terms of my cognitive ability, or my sight, or worse? Despite these fears, it was also an enlightening time, helping to put my life in perspective. As someone who was used to being in control and not asking others for help, I realized that I did need help, and this was one of my first exposures to the power of vulnerability. I owe so much to the people who helped me through that time, my immediate family of course, and also people like my father’s cousin’s wife, who is the director of pediatric endocrinology at Columbia and helped me get a better understanding of the procedure and make sure I was talking to the right physicians. And people like my business school friend Judy, who came over to give me a massage the night before my surgery. I would never have thought of asking someone for that, but instinctively she just knew it would help, and it truly did, reminding me that human connection is so, so important.
But the biggest shift in perspective that comes with an experience like this is the realization that life may be shorter than you think, and how important it is to be grateful for all the time we do have together. Sometimes, on days that are hard, I think about the letters I wrote before my surgery to Len, and to my parents, and to my sisters, just in case something went wrong, and I realize that whatever problem or stress I’m facing now pales in comparison. Because at this exact moment, there are others going into surgery, getting news of the loss of a loved one, or facing other life-and-death moments. I was very lucky to come through this experience, and I know that not everyone is so lucky.
IT’S ABOUT THE STRUGGLE
SOMETIMES, THE VALUE is actually in the obstacles themselves. My daughters had an amazing math teacher in elementary school whose innovative approach to the subject also taught valuable lessons for life. Math, she said, wasn’t about getting the right or wrong answer.
It was about “the struggle.”
Learning how to keep going, even when things get tough, is the critical skill to master. As she pointed out, the world’s best mathematicians often spend years working on solving a single complex problem. She was trying to teach the kids in her class not only the math skills they needed, but also that they could struggle through something and not give up. She would give them exercises specifically to push them on this point by setting rules like, “You can use a calculator, but you can’t use the multiplication button.” By challenging them in these unique ways, she hoped to get them to think creatively about solving difficult problems, and also to encourage them to fight for a solution even when it is hard.
How you approach obstacles and challenges—where you believe your stores of grit and resilience come from—may be related to your ultimate success.
According to Carol Dweck, Stanford University psychologist and author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, people with a fixed mind-set believe that their traits are just givens. They believe they were born with a certain amount of intelligence or potential and that talent alone—not hard work—is what determines success. People with a growth mind-set, on the other hand, believe their qualities can be developed through their dedication and effort. Whatever skills and talents they’ve been born with are just the starting points for them. They understand that no one great has ever accomplished great things without years of passionate practice and learning.
Most people, Dweck explains in a Harvard Business Review article, don’t only adhere to one mind-set or the other. We usually have a combination of these beliefs that changes with time and experience but that powerfully affects our potential for achievement. When situations are difficult, things change. “Even if we correct these misconceptions, it’s still not easy to attain a growth mindset. One reason why is we all have our own fixed-mindset triggers. When we face challenges, receive criticism, or fare poorly compared with others, we can easily fall into insecurity or defensiveness, a response that inhibits growth.”
Leaders and companies are also affected by the kind of mind-set they adopt. As Dweck explains: “Organizations that embody a growth mindset encourage appropriate risk-taking, knowing that some risks won’t work out. They reward employees for important and useful lessons learned, even if a project does not meet its original goals. They support collaboration across organizational boundaries rather than competition among employees or units. They are committed to the growth of every member, not just in words but in deeds, such as broadly available development and advancement opportunities. And they continually reinforce growth mindset values with concrete policies.”
A 2016 study published in Frontiers in Psychology by Dave Collins, Aine MacNamara, and Neil McCarthy confirms that the way athletes approach adversity is also what separates world-class “super champions” from the “almost champions” who were talented but didn’t make it to the highest levels. The study found that super champions had an “almost fanatical reaction to challenge.” Super champions talked about “how setbacks, injury or deselection for example, were catalysts for their development rather than roadblocks.” In contrast, the almost champions talked about how easily things came to them initially, and then blamed setbacks on external causes, became negative, or lost motivation. Although both types of athletes faced similar challenges, how they reacted to those challenges was distinct and made a significant impact on their ultimate level of success.
Mastering the struggle isn’t always easy—not in math, not in sports, and not in life. But day after day, ordinary people overcome the odds and push through hard times to achieve great things. And knowing that the more resilience we bring to facing the obstacles in our paths the more successful we are likely to be, certainly helps along the way.
FUN!™
WHEN FACING MAJOR obstacles, it helps not only to see the obstacles as opportunities to grow but also to find people who are good in a crisis. There are people out there who thrive in times of crisis, and it’s great to find those people and keep them close to you. They can be terrific not only at helping you manage these challenging moments but also at helping you grow this skill within yourself.
Benjamin Joffe-Walt (“BJW,” bear-hugger extraordinaire), who was introduced in Chapter 6, is one of these people. Before joining Change.org, he was an award-winning journalist for the Guardian and the Telegraph, covering major news stories around the world, particularly in Africa, from the genocide in Darfur to Hutu refugees in Rwanda. He’s been at the center of some pretty tough situations. When we first met I remember hearing some of these stories, which started with comments like, “When I was arrested for bringing medicine to Cuba . . .” or “When I got dysentery in the Sudan . . .” You know, just like the stories we all tell around the dinner table, right?
When BJW ran the Change.org communications team, he told his team that one way to handle a difficult crisis situation is to distance yourself enough emotionally from the seriousness of it and instead to see it as “fun.” Obviously this strategy wasn’t meant to downplay the gravitas of the incident, but rather to focus people on finding a solution to the challenge and on recognizing what could be learned from working your way through the crisis. It was a coping mechanism to deal with the sometimes overwhelming pressures of the job in a way that brought people together. The team had a group chat they were all part of, and whenever one of them would face a crisis or challenge in their country—a particular petition that the press was critical of, or someone accusing us of having fake signatures, etc.—they would all reply to that person in the chat with an ironic “Fun!” It took the edge off for the person whose job it was to manage that particular crisis and let them know that the rest of the team was there to support them. The late, amazing Jake Brewer, who used to run external affairs for Change.org and then went to work in the White House before dying tragically in a cycling accident in 2015, was great at this, too. He approached every crisis ready to charge in and was open-minded to different approaches. He took “Fun!” and added a “™” suggesting that if our team got really good at this, they could own it, even making it our trademark to be really great at tackling any type of challenging situation. So no matter how hard it got, the answer was always, “Fun!™”
In late 2016 I spoke on a panel about crisis management at a Fortune conference, where I met Brooke Buchanan, who has led communications teams at Walmart, Theranos, and Whole Foods, among other companies. She described this so well: “For some reason I love running into the fire.” And she explained how she sleeps with two phones near her bed, just in case something important should happen. You want to find people like Brooke, BJW, and Jake—people who are at their best in challenging moments and can teach others to rise to the challenge as well.
As we worked with the team through ups and downs at Change.org, BJW and I often used a maritime metaphor when we talked to people about why the ability to stay calm and adaptable in difficult situations is a critical leadership skill at all levels: You don’t learn to be an outstanding captain by taking your ship out in a lake; you have to navigate a storm to really test yourself. Great leaders have to be able to lead through storms as well as calm waters, and it helps to have shipmates who get fired up by the storm.
UNDERSTANDING THAT CHANGE is a process comprising multiple steps and stages that bring you from an ideal vision of a desired future to a sometimes imperfect present, full of ever-changing obstacles, requires a willingness to see setbacks and failures as potentially transformative moments. Persevering and remaining hopeful in the face of obstacles and finding creative ways to use criticism to advance your cause are crucial skills that all movement starters and leaders can master. And when you’re on the dark side of the mountain, they will help you keep climbing.