Every entrepreneur needs a moral compass. For me, the core elements are fearlessness, commitment, decision-making, and simplicity.
“Our mission.”
“Our values.”
“Our purpose.”
Large organizations often communicate their missions, values, and purpose all over the place.
We don’t have those documents at Yonder, a B2B SaaS company. However, I created a personal mission statement for myself, listing a few core points that are important in all my activities.
In contrast to the well-known mission statements, it’s not meant for wide communication, nor is it meant to be something I am trying to impose on others. Rather, it’s an anchor document I regularly review and expand based on my experience. I review it at least monthly, and I often return to the document in times of hardship and doubt.
All voyeurs, you can stop reading now. I will not share my entire personal mission statement, but only some parts that are relevant to me as an entrepreneur.
Core Trait 1: Fearlessness
I don’t consider myself fearless in a heroic way. Rather, fearlessness in an entrepreneurial sense means to keep carrying on, whatever may come your way.
In entrepreneurship, everything is possible, but nothing is easy. The administration will throw roadblocks at you, competitors will try to outperform you, and work conditions will never be ideal. Just when you think you’re back on top of things, good old Murphy will hit and treat you with a cyber attack, a system outage, or a legal battle. If everything is under control, you’re not fast enough.
Furthermore, you can become quite fearful when looking at all those success posts on social media. Why does everybody else have success, and I am battling the odds? Speaking for myself, it’s because swimming against the current has proven to be the right strategy during the last 20 years, but it’s a rather unsexy strategy. Investments in readiness for different scenarios might look uncool for years, but save you in our uncertain world when things can change in a split-second.
Last but not least, success and failure are always very close in our complex world. Even if you think you’ve made it, you can still screw up big time. Light and shadow are close, and it’s important to learn to live with the shadows if you don’t want to end up freaking out constantly.
Core Trait 2: Commitment
I’m afraid to inform you that you won’t be able to build something great and meaningful by sticking to the local labor law. Building something out of nothing requires perseverance and commitment over years. Storms and setbacks are part of the game. No reason to complain, just keep going and carry on.
There is always something to be upset about in entrepreneurship — administration, demanding customers, rogue co-founders. But I would suggest you don’t waste your energy on things you can’t change, because your energy is limited and so is your time on this planet.
Even when you are fully committed to building something great and meaningful, now and then you need a bit of rest. For me, it doesn’t just mean sleep and spending time in the mountains, but also time to think and read. This helps me gain new inputs, ask the right questions, and develop new ideas I wouldn’t have if I’d constantly run after the latest urgency or lose my energy with things I cannot change.
Core Trait 3: Decision-Making
In today’s complex world, you never have all the information to make the perfect decision. So therefore, you have to learn to make good decisions in due time, even if you don’t have all the information to make a perfect decision. You can always change paths when new information becomes available, and redo and improve a task at a later stage. In software engineering, we call this refactoring.
What has worked well for me over the last 20 years is to work out options before I make a decision. In the planning phase, I always try to develop ambitious options for really big solutions. And in the implementation phase, I mix and adapt those ambitious options to the dirty real world.
Core Trait 4: Simplicity
I’m a simple mind, and I am very happy to be a simple mind. Complex solutions never work in real life, simple solutions always do. So crafting simple solutions is an art, not sloppery.
The same thing applies to material possessions. I am happy with the stuff that I have, I don’t always long for more and better stuff. Maintaining stuff makes your life complicated and drains your energy, and this missing energy will adversely impact your time to think and read: You will end up with more stuff, but less great ideas.
Your company, and the world, need more great ideas, not more stuff.
