Resilience in Entrepreneurship: Lessons from My Lowest Points

For 7 years, Hop has been my driving passion. We’re now innovating new products, powered purely by our own bootstrap mentality, yielding significant financial growth.

But entrepreneurship is more than a pursuit of enterprise; it’s an intimate dance with oneself.

Everyone else sees product launches, profits, and public milestones. What really defines the entrepreneurial journey is the internal monologue — the lessons, growth, and challenges in the background.

As I look back on my journey, a few lessons stick out to me. I’ve simplified them into five simple words.

Mindset

We often romanticize entrepreneurship. We look up to the Zuckerbergs and Elons of the world. And every time we see a business influencer post from Bora Bora, we feel something.

Aside from the world’s 0.0001% innovators and the laptop gurus who make their money off your views, entrepreneurs’ lives are the same as yours. Most of the time, we’re just trying to figure out how to make it work.

I’m sure you know the truism, “It’s not whether you get knocked down, it’s whether you get up.”

Every rejection, setback, and failure in the entrepreneurial realm is a touchstone of your mental fortitude. It’s testing both your idea and character.

In my experience, the entrepreneurial mindset has four pillars.

  • The transformative power of rejection. A rejection can serve as a catalyst for profound reflection. Use it to improve your product, refine your proposal, and return with something too compelling to ignore.
  • Envisioning success. You don’t have a crystal ball. But mentally, you need to. You’ll eventually bring on partners, hire employees, and grow your customer base. If you don’t believe in your company’s future, nobody will.
  • Commitment to the vision. They say around two-thirds of businesses fail within ten years. To that, I’d ask, “Did they fail, or did you quit?” Commit to the long-term, and you’ll find your way around short-term roadblocks.
  • Evolving with experience. You’ll never know the result of something until you do it. Unfortunately, nobody’s telling you what to do. Whether you took a win or a loss, those lessons are what inform your next move.

Selectivity

If you’ve ever shopped for laundry detergent, you know about the Paradox of Choice. Picture that, but 1,000x.

  • Tons of people will want your time.
  • Plenty of qualified ones will want your business.
  • Countless will offer their feedback and two cents.
  • You could add dozens of new features and services.
  • Or, you could do nothing.

As a younger, less experienced entrepreneur, I was hungry. I wasn’t sure which pieces to pick up, so I picked up all of them.

I jumped at opportunities that cost me more time than they were worth. I took advice I didn’t need. And I said “yes” to, perhaps, more people than I should have.

For many entrepreneurs, the line between personal and professional is blurry. When I treated the two equally, I started to notice a difference.

  • I became more conscious of what I ate.
  • I picked up martial arts.
  • I became more aware of the content I consumed.

The choices you make either push you toward your vision or away from it. Be mindful of that when you choose who to work with, what advice to take, and how you spend your time.

Resilience

Ask 100 people how they scaled their business. They’ll give you 100 different answers.

What they’ll all tell you, however, is they took an iterative approach.

When they explain how they started, you’ll always hear them say, “But then, we figured out that … That’s when things really started to take off”.

It’s the never-ending cycle of failure, learning, and growth that makes resilience so crucial for successful entrepreneurs. The best ones don’t shy away.

There will be days that test your limits. Days when the market crashes, a trusted employee leaves, or a significant deal falls through.

Your capacity to tackle them is what defines who you are as an entrepreneur.

Develop it early on and remember: In entrepreneurship, progress happens when you don’t give up.

Association

You are your six best friends.

At the end of the day, successful entrepreneurs are just people who believe in something enough to work on it every day, regardless of what anyone else thinks or says.

And when you look at who they surround themselves with, it’s always others who benefit their mental, physical, and emotional health.

Surround yourself with people who know more than you, believe in what you’re doing, share your vision, and inspire you to grow as a person.

You’ll find that the people you hand around and respect rub off onto you. And so do their results.

Discipline

The most underrated quality an entrepreneur can have. It’s something I look for in everyone I work with.

I’ll be the first to admit I’ve had moments of doubt, days where I lack motivation, and weeks where I’m completely out of routine.

But life is a game of habits, good and bad. The ability to recognize and reset is what separates those who make it and those who don’t.

To be more disciplined, you need to embrace three things:

  • Self-awareness. First and foremost, you need to know your rhythm. How you work, what stresses you out, what distracts you, when you’re most productive, and which behaviors inhibit your progress.
  • Structured flexibility. Schedule your day, week, and month in advance. Create plans and stick to them. But leave plenty of time for the things that don’t fit in a box.
  • Accountability. The best thing about entrepreneurship is nobody’s telling you what to do. The worst thing is that nobody’s telling you what to do. Once you create a system that works for you, you need to practice holding yourself accountable.

It doesn’t happen overnight…

You can read my reflections and experiences. You can read everyone else’s.

Truth is, we all did that, too. You’ll still make mistakes, only to realize later how obvious the solution was.

That’s life.

You learn by doing. You learn by failing. And, eventually, you learn by succeeding.