There are so many adages about persistence; it can make your head spin. “90% of success is just showing up”. “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” And perhaps my favorite “Being defeated is only a temporary condition; giving up is what makes it permanent.”
Persistence is unquestionably needed as an entrepreneur, and is often highlighted as the number one quality of a successful entrepreneur. Mark Suster recently covered this topic well on his blog.
What really needs to be said about persistence though is that it has to be married with the ability to change course quickly if that is what the market is telling you. Steve Blank of Four Steps to the Epiphany fame has a great story about adapting quickly when initial market assumptions don’t work out. An entrepreneur went to his VC board to tell them what wasn’t working and what the plan was to change it. The inexperienced VCs screamed, but the older, wiser VC in the room calmly told the entrepreneur to follow his gut and make the strategy change. That’s brave for an entrepreneur to admit what wasn’t working, and commendable for the investor to believe in the entrepreneur.
Having a quick iteration loop and adapting quickly has been defined by Eric Ries as the pivot. This turns out to be incredibly hard to do for tech entrepreneurs when you have a large “sunk cost” of a particular iteration or set of code. You really want to believe that your initial assumptions will work out, and it can be difficult to determine when enough is enough and to try something else.
I don’t think there is anything more important to remember as an entrepreneur, or general business person, as 1) be persistent and 2) be willing to pivot. Those two qualities are at the foundation of any successful venture. If you can do both of those things well, your chance of success goes up by an order of magnitude.
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