Yesterday I recorded an episode of the Disrupt Disruption podcast with Mary Grove, Managing Director of Bread and Butter Ventures and former founding director at Google for Startups (and a whole bunch more). In our conversation, Mary shares her deeply insightful learnings from thousands of startups, explores how corporates can better partner and work with entrepreneurs and their companies, and discusses common pitfalls to avoid. Do yourself a favor and listen…
While editing the episode, I realized that this is the 45th interview I have published on the Disrupt Disruption podcast. We are also some 110+ episodes into the audio version of The Heretic. And, of course, this post marks the 1,253rd post on The Heretic itself.
You can say that I have the ability to stick with things in the long run. Make no mistake, though; I tried and dropped plenty of things after doing them once or a few times at best.
The difference?
It’s not necessarily pure enjoyment of doing the thing (trust me, there are plenty of times when I don’t want to write a Heretic dispatch). It certainly isn’t an immediate success (both podcasts took quite a while to gain more than a handful of listeners). It’s because it feels important and meaningful. Note that I say “feel” not “is” – who knows if any of this is important. But it does feel important and meaningful to me.
This brings me to the main point: I don’t think you can build anything meaningful if you are not 100% convinced that it is meaningful to you. If you do things half-heartedly, with an expectation of some form of success to motivate you, I can nearly guarantee you that you won’t stick with it for the necessary time it takes to make it successful. But if you do something because you feel it is important and meaningful… well… then you can go on and write 1,253 blog posts, record 110+ voice-overs, 45 long-form podcast episodes and look forward to the next one.
So – stick with it.