How Do I Achieve Success?

Success comes down to three factors: hard work, luck, and skill.

A particular person’s journey might require an equal one-third of each factor, but in most cases, they are not evenly distributed.

If we look at Mark Zuckerberg’s experience launching Facebook, we assume he worked hard and had some technical skills and a lot of luck. The luck of timing and stumbling onto an idea that others had around the same time were factors we can only guess fell into place for him.

How about Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson building Basecamp into a mostly bootstrapped company that throws off tens of millions of dollars per year in profit?

When I asked Jason on stage at MicroConf in 2019 why Basecamp had over 3 million accounts created in its first 15 years, he responded, “Truthfully, luck and timing were one and two. And we did a good job, too. But really it was luck and timing.”

Hearing him recount the story, it’s obvious they worked hard and had excellent design and technical chops. Those two factors alone would have allowed them to build a great business. But maybe not one that grew organically to (presumably) more than $100 million in revenue in about a decade.

Plenty of highly skilled founders work hard on their ideas only to build companies worth far less than Basecamp.

You can control two of these factors: hard work and skill. Although we can attempt to create our own luck, we do that by working hard and acquiring or improving our skills.

Skills can be improved through applying hard work to a particular field of study, for example: copywriting, visual design, filmmaking, coding, or SEO.

With each of us starting from a different place, some may need more work to learn skills others gained through their upbringing. But you can build skills to become more successful through hard work.

You can also control your mindset.

Successful founders come in all varieties. Some are highly driven and motivated and seem to move at superhuman speeds. Others are more chill and purposeful, showing up day after day to do the work. But they all share a few key traits.

Successful Founders Have a Bias toward Action. When in doubt, they do something. They don’t wait around; they don’t procrastinate. They don’t think of reasons it should take longer—they start shipping.

A mistake I see founders make is taking too long to act. They get paralyzed in analysis and have a lot of churning without making any notable progress.

Successful Founders Develop Their Gut. I’ve talked a lot about “founder gut” in this book, that instinct that helps you tune out the noise and find the right path. Some founders have it innately. Others develop it by going through the School of Hard Knocks and learning through trial and error what works and what doesn’t.

You can also circumvent some of the more painful lessons on your way to developing your founder gut by watching, listening, and learning from others.

You might join a mastermind group and learn from your peers. You can hire a coach. You can find a mentor—whether that’s someone you know personally or someone you’ve never met whose work you follow. (I’ll talk more about finding masterminds and mentors later in this section.)

I can’t underscore enough that learning from others is a great way to develop your founder gut. You’ll save so much time and heartache than if you insist on making all your own mistakes.

My founder gut has made huge leaps when I’m around someone who’s amazing at something that I am not.

Successful Founders Manage Their Own Psychology. For years I’ve been saying that more than half of being a successful founder is managing your own psychology. I came to this realization after seeing my wife, Dr. Sherry Walling, help founders find success after months or years of failure due to mental blocks and other unhelpful patterns.

In parallel, I’ve observed founders who seem to succeed no matter what’s thrown at them, be it unethical competitors, hackers, lawsuits, or a major platform threatening to shut them down (all scenarios I’ve helped founders work through).

Then there are those who get in their own way at every step. They don’t do it intentionally, but they always seem to have a reason they can’t ship, can’t market, aren’t closing sales, or aren’t growing their business.

It’s about their internal psychology.

In the rest of this section, I’ll talk about some of the frameworks that are key to developing the mindset you need for your business to achieve escape velocity.

Let’s start by helping you get out of your own way.