Courage

WISE ENDURANCE OF SUFFERING SEES THE DAY

The hardest part of running a company is the emotional toll. Sadly, it’s seldom discussed (and I’d like to change that).

Founding a startup requires entering a new relationship, perhaps like that between a nurse and a child. 

If your company improves, you will leap with joy, and when it suffers you will recoil in rage and sadness. If it dies, your heart will break. However, all but the deepest wounds recover with time and self-soothing, and you will learn to try again.

After heartbreak, it’s hard to feel the same flutter of naïve innocence as you once had. It takes willful effort to take stock of everything you’ve gained, all the ways you’ve grown, and to couple that with your faith in yourself and in the power of creating new engines of happiness.

It takes tremendous courage to keep fighting, keep building, take the punches and get back up. But if you train yourself, like any warrior, to face down terror and carry on—despite the weight of your responsibility to employees, clients, and humanity—you’ll have gained the most crucial skill of any entrepreneur.

Therefore, friends, cultivate the virtue of bravery in all things, and may courage be your superpower!