Run Upstairs
Life is hard.
Very few people would argue with this.
Run upstairs.
I cannot remember who said this, but I heard it on David Senra's “Founders” podcast.
It's a pithy saying that means that choosing the harder path is almost always the better path if you want to be successful and outperform your competition.
It comes from the idea of a schoolyard bully, who is often overweight. When you are running away from the schoolyard bully, run for the stairs, and then run upstairs. He has a lot more weight to carry up there than you.
The harder problem becomes your advantage
If you are a small agile startup, filled with passion and energy, and there is a problem in the market to be solved that is really hard – go for solving that problem. Your larger competitors have a whole lot of weight that they are pulling behind them. There is a very good chance that you will be able to outrun them
Or as someone else once put it: Small companies succeed by being excellent. Big companies succeed by sucking less than other big companies. The little bit of time I had spent in the corporate world has convinced me that this is mostly true, most of the time.
Running up the wrong stairs
But here is something that I've come to recognise is true at a personal level for me. I have generally, for most of my life, chosen the hard path – or at least that is the way it feels. If I had two options of what I could be doing, I would pick the one that seemed like the biggest challenge. Running upstairs seems to be my natural inclination.
However, looking back at my life, I now realise that, although they were all hard, some were hard but good, and others were hard and bad.
When I was in Deloitte, I was expected to do work for which I had no skillset, had no natural interest in, and that did not fit in any way into my future. The careers of my team were potentially at risk based on my performance. How I ended up in this position is a story for another day – but the point is this: It was really hard for me, but the hardship also was not moving my life forward in any meaningful way.
It was hard and bad. I was running upstairs. And they were the wrong stairs.
I have more stories like that. Restaurants. Military service. Selling insurance – Getting myself into “hard and bad” situations seems to come quite naturally for me.
Hard and bad happened when I felt as if the work I was doing was relatively meaningless, and it was not moving my life in any way towards a better future.
Running up the right stairs
Hard and good happened when the work I was doing was in some way meaningful to me. When I worked for Huisman in China, I found the creative process in that business intensely interesting. Huisman did the entire EPCIC process. Engineer, Procure, Construct, Install, Commission – on some of the biggest, most complex products in the world.
Most of their products were custom-designed and built. That meant that the product literally started with a few conversations and ideas that would be sketched out. Those would become the starting point for concept design drawings, which would then go through a whole process until you had shopdrawings down to the finest detail of each product. These would go to the shopfloor, where steel plates would be cut, bent, machined, fitted, welded, and painted. Electronics, cabling, control systems, hydraulics would all be added until another one of the largest and most sophisticated pieces of equipment in the world, would be installed on some of the most sophisticated vessels in the world, with everything fully integrated.
In case you missed it – I get really excited about this stuff.
The work I did there was hard. We were trying to figure out how to build products more efficiently, and to a higher quality – and building these products involved more than 40 departments working together, with suppliers from all over the world. Projects would run for several years. Some of those project plans had more than 30 000 line items. It was a Dutch company in China. Building a strong culture took a herculean effort. Misunderstandings and conflict were a-plenty. Engineers had to work closely with manufacturing production people – two very different sub-cultures.
My job was to continually make all of this work better, in every way that you can interpret the word, “better.”
It was hard. It took every bit of mental strength we had to figure out what to improve and develop, what the sequence was in which those improvements and development projects had to happen, and then to drive the focus of that whole organisation towards implementing those improvements through all the day to day operational challenges.
But it was good. It was deeply satisfying. It stretched every skill I had to the maximum, and in the process developed those skills even further. These were skills I had built up over the years, and skills that, when I would be working in them, would make me feel alive.
This was hard but good.
At the moment I am building 5-2-50. I find this really hard. It is forcing me to develop skills I don't have, and to hone existing skills to a whole new level.
Each of those skills are skills I will need, in order to build a better future – A future where I can do more and more work that I love, having an impact that I find meaningful, and making a good living from it.
Again, hard but good.
Run Upstairs. But Pick the Right Stairs.
Looking back over my life, I can now look at each season, and I can see which ones were hard and bad, and which ones were hard but good.
As you build your business, know that it is going to be hard. That is normal.
But make every effort to choose the “hard but good” path. That is where you will find the most meaning and fulfilment – and probably also the most enduring success. Even if you do fail, the learning from it will be valuable, so as you get up, dust yourself off, and start again, you will be better equipped for the next set of stairs.
Kies jou sukkel
For those who do not understand Afrikaans, this little phrase I added behind the heading will be an enigma. It is very difficult to translate this from Afrikaans to English and still get the full meaning. The closest I can get is, “Pick your struggle.”
A large part of the inspiration for this post came from a good friend of mine with whom I was having a conversation, which was in Afrikaans, where we spoke about this idea that most of the time in life, we are struggling with something. However, not everything is worth the struggle. So pick which struggles you will engage, and which ones you will ignore. Pick your struggle. Kies jou sukkel.
Run upstairs.
But pick your stairs carefully.
Blessings to you
Ashton
Grow Your Business
5-2-50 is a community of Christian entrepreneurs and founders who are passionate about building wealth and eradicating poverty by creating good jobs. We focus on businesses of at least 5 people that have been running for at least five years, helping them grow to at least 50 people, reach ZAR 10 million per year NPAT, and free the founders from the day to day grind of their business.
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