I try to read a business/management book every month and happened to pick The Lean Startup‘ by Eric Ries as an impulse buy based on a recommendation on Twitter. Its an interesting book and quite different from the books that I’ve read on this subject. For one it doesn’t talk about grand ideas and other sexy start up stuff (Funding. Marketing Blitzkrieg etc) instead it focus on the most practical aspects of running a startup(esp a product startup) and building a scalable business out of it.
One of the things that struck a chord with me was this thing called ‘The Myth of Perseverance’, which essentially means falling into the trap of believing that the hardwork one is doing for their startup will eventually pay off and result in success. A typical example of this could be a team of engineers & designers working a web product, adding features and making changes regularly and thinking that they are creating value and after a period of time their product will become popular/profitable and their efforts will reap good returns.
This phenomenon is quite commonplace at the individual level as well. There are plenty people who continue to slog in the jobs routinely spending hours at stretch and hoping their designation/pay etc will improve just because they are putting in a lot of hard work.
While there is nothing wrong with doing hard work in startups or jobs it also has its fallout. The biggest fallout here is focusing too much on the hard work in hope that it will somehow work out and in doing this they delay/don’t realize if things aren’t working out the way they were supposed to and thus preventing them from making any effort in this direction. This gets particularly tricky when the business/product seems to be running but not running well enough, this illusion of progress can be really dangerous
In short, be it a job or a startup it doesn’t have to necessarily take years of hard work for finding the stairway to success.
This myth is applicable to anything from Business to Relationships. When things don’t seem to work even after doing everything you can think of, maybe its time to ‘Pivot‘