All Business Leaders Think About Quitting
Welcome to the four and final post in our series on leading bravely. If you haven’t read parts 1-3, check them out here:
- Part 1: Why Leading Bravely Is Key to Entrepreneurial Success
- Part 2: Protecting Your Confidence
- Part 3: When Making Decisions, Aim for Directionally Accurate
Here’s the dirty little secret all business leaders share.
Every single one of them has thought about quitting.
Correction.
Every single one of them thinks about quitting. On a regular basis.
For me, it’s like clockwork. Every 3-6 months, I swear I’m going to hang the whole entrepreneur thing up.
And every couple of weeks, I find myself asking: What am I doing this for? Are we executing the right strategy? Am I building the right business? Is this even the right career path?
***
I have no idea what goes on inside your head. But at the same time, I know exactly what goes on inside your head.
Fear. Worry. Doubt. Dark thoughts that you constantly censor from the outside world. Thoughts you’re hardly willing to acknowledge yourself.
This self-censoring, I think, is partly a coping mechanism. If we spent too much time getting dragged down by our worst “what-if” scenarios, we’d never survive.
But at the same time, it’s not that helpful to constantly pretend that our confidence never wavers.
Sometimes being in business feels like taking a constant beating. There’s tension with your team, tension with your customers, tension with friends and peers. You’re not finding enough leads, hiring the right people, or achieving the right margins.
It’s hard work. And no matter how successful you get, it never stops being hard work.
Of course, there are things you can do so that the business isn’t overwhelming—get the right team on board, operationalize your efforts, put a strong system in place for running the company.
But there will always be challenges. There will always be tradeoffs. There will always be that nagging question, “Is this all worth it?”
I can’t say with 100% certainty that it is.
***
What I can say is that this is why leaders need to be brave: because you’re grappling with this question on a daily basis.
And you’ll need to act bravely if you want to keep going.
Because what matters isn’t that you have doubts.
It’s that you keep going, one more day, week, or year beyond when the average person would have given up.
It’s that you act in spite of those doubts, and you make the best possible decisions with the information you have available, knowing those decisions will never be perfect.
If you can approach leadership with this mindset, then even when you’re failing, you’re winning.
You don’t ever really fail; you just fall down.
And then you get back up again.
***
If there’s anything you take away from this series, I hope it’s that you are already leading bravely. To have gotten to where you are today, and to keep going, takes a lot of courage. And your courage inspires me to keep going, to commit and recommit to my mission of helping companies…even on my hardest days. Thank you—as always, I’m so grateful for you.
