We Do What Others Won't

“Founders do what others won’t, so they can do what others can’t.”

That’s what I told a young aspiring Founder who was helping me construct a wall in my soon-to-be Master Bedroom of the new home I’m building. He was curious as to why I’d be willing to do this kind of work myself — in 15-degree cold on a Saturday.

Like I’ve explained countless times before, what drives my fellow Founders and me isn’t that we’ve got some special talent. It’s that we have an unreasonable willingness to do the stuff no one else is willing to do.

No reasonable person is willing to withstand 15-degree cold, on their day off, to do some interior framing when they could just as soon hire someone to do the work. But unreasonable people, like us, jump out of bed to do the things other people won’t do.

So he asked me a reasonable question, “Why are you willing to do it? What is it about Founders that makes them perfectly OK with doing ridiculously hard things?”

Well, son, pull up a chair and let Old Man Wil explain something to ya…

The Price of Willingness

Ask any non-Founder what they want. They'll tell you: financial freedom, time on their own terms, work they're proud of, the ability to build something that's theirs. Now ask what they're willing to do to get it.

That's where it gets quiet.

You see, everyone wants the stuff, but no one is really willing to pay the price to get it. The price isn’t the money; it’s the sacrifice to get there.

It’s going year after year without any idea if we’ll get a reliable income. It’s emptying your savings into something with zero guarantee you’ll ever see it again. It’s every opportunity you didn’t take to go on vacation, spend time with family, or enjoy that “me time” we really need.

These aren’t badges of honor. They are the literal price of admission, and Founders, unlike 99% of the rest of the world, are a rare breed who are willing to pay it.

The Compounding Factor of Willingness

For those on the outside, they tend to take that price of willingness and trivialize it into a single event. “Oh, he sacrificed his savings and built that company,” as if we simply wrote a check for our life savings, and that was the event that catapulted us to success.

That’s like saying we skipped a meal one time and that’s why we lost 50 pounds. It wasn’t a single event; it was a non-stop mindset and discipline that affects every aspect of our lives, and it compounds over time.

Where most Founders drop off is their lack of willingness to sustain that sacrifice. You know why people drop off? Because it’s a super reasonable thing to do! A reasonable person does not want to inflict harm on themselves, cause catastrophic loss, or create drama in their relationships.

But Founders have the willingness to do this over, and over, and over. Every sacrifice compounds our resolve. It hardens us. It makes us more capable of doing what others won’t.

The Asymmetric Reward

Of course, we don’t do these things because we enjoy the sacrifice; we do them because we want to control our outcomes. We’re looking for an asymmetric reward in this life. Later on, people will think it was all in order to get a nicer house or a private jet. While some Founders may enjoy those luxuries, that’s rarely what’s driving those sacrifices.

Our asymmetric rewards come with ownership of our outcomes. We set our own schedule, even if that schedule is working every waking hour. We answer to no one.

We build what we want, when we want, how we want.

The control of our own lives is the reward for sacrificing those lives.

That kind of outcome isn’t gifted. You can’t apply for that job. The only way to get it is to earn it, and the only way to earn it is to do really hard shit.

What are You Willing to Pay?

After explaining all of that to this young Founder, I turned the question on him “So now that you know what the price is, what are you willing to pay?”

He took a moment to think about it. To be fair, it’s an awfully heavy question to be asked by some old guy at 6 in the morning in the freezing cold, so it took a moment to process.

He then responded, “I don’t think I’m willing to go to that extreme.”

It was an honest answer, albeit not the one I was expecting from an aspiring Founder. I sometimes forget what many of us who have been doing this for a long time take for granted (the sacrifice) is actually new and terrifying to anyone else.

I told him “That’s how we all start. We go into this as perfectly reasonable people and come out of this as Founders. You’ll see.”

A month later, I helped him found his first company.

Game on, young buck.

In Case You Missed It

Embrace How Messed Up You Are What if there isn't a fix but instead a whole new world that opens up when we embrace how messed up we are?

How Do I Leave My Startup Stress At Work? While startup stress might not ever diminish completely, how we manage it can help us navigate balance in our lives as Founders.

The Emotional Cost of Being a Founder When we talk about building startups, we talk about lots of costs: Staffing costs, the cost of capital, cost per acquisition, and opportunity cost. But we never talk about the biggest cost – the emotional cost.