Endurance, More Than Anything

Photo by Brian Erickson on Unsplash

I believe endurance is the most critical ingredient of success.

Conventional thinking, fueled by everything we read in the media, suggests the key ingredients are far sexier: great ideas or talented teams or plenty of funding. Those are far more ‘romantic’ ideas and they certainly make for more enjoyable water cooler conversations.

And while they’re certainly important, they’re not the prime determinants. 

Because there’s no shortage of great ideas and inventions that have been left by the wayside by ‘lesser’ creations. (Think Sony Betamax in the early video wars, or DOS versus Macs in the early days of the PC). 

And successive waves of the web have seen lots of talented teams (i.e. well known, successful executives from brand name organizations) come together in an effort to make a particular business idea work, only to disband a while later. 

And, you could write a series of books on well funded entities that should have enjoyed incredible success but didn’t. (Quibi, anyone?)

So it’s clear there’s more to success than any of those factors. 

I’d like to suggest that the one constant in the companies that have succeeded in any meaningful way, has been endurance. 

The ability to continue to keep going when things look the hardest. The ability to weave their way through the issues of the day, when the world around them seems to be moving in a different direction. The ability to rally the troop and just keep taking one step forward, then another, and then another.  

Take out endurance and no amount of money, talent and innovation can save an organization. 

That isn’t to suggest that market movements and transformations don’t matter. That you can get by with absolutely no cash. Or that competitive movements don’t matter. Of course, they do. 

But assuming we have some product-market fit, assuming we are doing work that delivers value, assuming that our work has a real purpose, then our ability to endure will be directly related to our success.

We’ll find ways to keep executing and staying on plan. And where the plan isn’t working, we’ll figure out how to respond well. (In some ways, not being first to market can be an asset, because we can learn from the mistakes of those at the bleeding edge.)

More than anything, that sense of persistence, the ability, if you will, to not give up when the going gets tough, on insisting on battling through the problems, is our real superpower.

So, let’s certainly have the great ideas, let’s definitely get the talent, and even make sure we have the funding (though not too much). But let’s also not forget that endurance (and persistence) is central to not only our survival but our ability to achieve our loftiest goals.