“Just do it.”
“Carpe Diem.”
“Success is a Journey, Not a Destination.”
“Keep Buggering On.”
Mantras like these are remembered and repeated because they motivate us to keep pursuing our goals no matter how hard the journey gets—and if you’re doing any kind of work in innovation, this journey is hard as hell.
Our Programming Needs an Upgrade
When the going gets tough, many of our innate programs tell us to quit. The human mind and emotions evolved to keep us alive in a wild world where dangers lurked in every corner. Food was scarce. People died young. Planning for tomorrow was mostly a luxury.
So our brains evolved to prefer the easy paths and nudge us along when things got too hard. Herd of animals over there? Let’s run them all off a cliff and eat well for a few weeks. No more herds around? Time to pack up and find the next easy pickings.
Today this program doesn’t do us many favors. We endlessly gorge on sweet and salty snacks without even leaving our homes. When work gets hard, we worry, wait for the weekend, and retreat to diversions. We quit our new healthy habits on the third day when it gets tough. Excuses magically pop into our minds non-stop.
And if we fail at something in the past, we tend to fear we’ll fail again. Our evolutionary programming assumes we’ll die if we keep figuratively hitting our heads against the wall in trying something new and difficult. Success was just surviving.
But survival is very rarely the issue today. Success in work almost always revolves around doing something new. Nearly every business team is charged with doing new things to boost sales, improve efficiency, delight customers, disrupt competitors, and do more with less.
Doing anything new is hard, so our modern, conscious minds need to reprogram themselves for what success looks like today.
“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”
For millennia meditators have rewired their minds by “watching” unproductive thoughts arise and using mantras to redirect them onto a more positive path. This helps better deal with negativity at the moment, and over time, your brain re-wires itself to more positive thoughts.
“If it was easy, anyone could do it.”
I’m still early in my mediation journey, but I’ve experienced this firsthand. Startups are hard as hell—especially going from zero to one. The world seems designed to work against you. Doubts arise in my mind every damn day, but I’ve been able to witness the negative thought and use mantras to get back in gear. Increasingly I “hear” the positive mantra first when bad shit happens. That’s a sign that the re-wiring is working.
And there’s one phrase that I’ve been familiar with since college that has become a particular game-changer for me:
Next Play
I went to Duke University for my undergraduate degree in 1990. For a long time, the school has had a top-notch basketball team, which until last season was led by now Hall of Fame coach Mike Krzyzewski—a.k.a. Coach K. Within weeks of landing on campus, I became one of the Cameron Crazies—camping out for weeks to get into a basketball game and standing to shout choreographed cheers through every minute of every home game.
Through my fandom, I’ve seen Coach K’s leadership process and results. He won many games and sent many stars to the NBA. But his most important legacy was developing the players' character on his teams, whether they hung a banner that year or not.
One of the key techniques Coach K taught his players was the concept of “Next Play.” As best described in this article, Next Play is about resetting negative, unproductive, and distracting thoughts by encouraging us to forget the past and live in the present. It’s especially useful in a time-out, after a tough loss, or even after a national championship. Coach K’s players say the phrase helped them in life long after their playing days were over.
Next Play continues to stick in my head. Our current startup is a tech-enabled recruiting business. While recruiting agencies have been around forever, we’ve built a model that breaks the mold and significantly improves the experience for both talent looking for roles and companies looking to hire.
Let me show you how it works with some real examples…
The amazing candidate that just got an offer from our client was given a counteroffer and decided to stay at her current job. The client is pissed. We just lost $30,000 and have to start our search over.
Next Play.
Resilience and perseverance. Startups face numerous challenges and setbacks. "Next Play" serves as a reminder to bounce back, learn from failures, and keep pushing forward. There’s no use whining about it, and lots of great talent out there, so let’s restart the search.
The clients that signed our search contract with just a success fee are very slow to respond to our candidates. It doesn’t look like they are serious about hiring, and it’s hurting the candidate experience and wasting our time.
Next Play.
Evolving the business model. No plan survives first contact with the customer. Once you enter the market, you learn the most valuable lessons through failure. But there are many more customers we haven’t approached yet, and we can tweak our model and try to fix the issues. So we add a small retainer to our contract to ensure companies are really hiring by putting some skin in the game. It’s made everything we do more effective.
Our new client likes our pitch but will keep their current recruiting partner operating in parallel. So we’re in direct competition to land an engineer in this role—and those other guys have a big head start.
Next Play.
A sense of urgency. Startups are always operating against the clock. Customer attention and patience are low. So is your bank account. There’s no time to waste. What can we do today to move this forward? What’s blocking us from getting to the next phase of this project? Even baby steps keep the momentum on your side, and getting little things done continuously compound the odds of winning. We add some process steps that allow us to onboard clients and candidates quicker.
Woo Hoo! Our candidate signed the offer with our client and will start in two weeks. They also want to give us two new roles that they just opened.
Next Play.
Don’t rest on your success. Celebrate the hard-earned successes, of course, but building a real business is about keeping them coming. Next Play also means moving forward after you win. There’s another game tomorrow, and yesterday is in the past. Keep your ego in check and prove your value each day.
We’re working from home to save money on office space, and we hate commuting. But Zoom sucks, and we no longer have time to hang out.
Next Play.
Remember, it’s a game—play = fun. When I step back and think about the startups I’ve built, what I remember most is that it’s a team sport with so many fun moments together. We remember the joyful moments together much more than the product launch or quarterly sales result. So we need to make time to enjoy each others’ company and smile and laugh together each day. It’s even more fun when you sell one startup and build the next one with friends you worked with before. So we make time for bullshitting at the start of each Zoom meeting and make sure to get together for lunches and beers.
I’ll bet your business has similar challenges, and I’m sure this mantra can help you win. Give it a try today. Be the coach when your team needs a boost and throw a “Next Play” into Slack or the conference room when a helpful nudge is needed. Even better, try it with your own personal challenges. When the thoughts of pain, fear, or failure arise, take a deep breath and say, “Next Play.”
(And It Works in Life, Too)
It’s the summer of 2019, and I’m back on the Duke campus playing basketball in Cameron Indoor Stadium on Coach K court with Coach K himself on the sidelines watching me.
This is not a dream. It’s K Academy, an annual fantasy camp where about 80 players age 35 and up come for a long weekend of hoops. We play real, full-court, 5-on-5 games and are coached by the current staff and former players. My team’s coach is Jon Scheyer, who would later take the head coaching spot at Duke.
It’s morning of the third day, and Scheyer just subbed me into the game. Soon after, there’s a turnover, and I run out on the left wing for a fast break. My friend, Jim, on the other team, is trying to catch up, but I’m confident I’ll beat him to a layup. I yell for the ball and get a pass from my teammate. As I pull it in and make a move toward the hoop, someone trips me, and I fall. The ball flies out of bounds. Turnover.
But how could I trip if there’s no one around me? I start to get up and realize that my right foot isn’t working right. I get helped off the court and then back to the training room. It takes about 5 seconds for the head trainer to diagnose me with a torn Achilles tendon. My camp is done. It’s going to be surgery and months of recovery. I’m given a boot and limp out of the gym to avoid stares from the rest of the campers.
And there I sit on a bench, looking out at the spot where I used to camp for games many years ago. Now I’m an old, injured fool who can’t play the game anymore. I’ve got surgery and months of rehab ahead. I will be a burden to my friends, family, and co-workers. I call my wife to tell her the bad news and start looking at flights home so I can leave the camp early. I’m not going to lie—some tears are welling up.
Next Play.
I gather myself after a few minutes. I decide to tackle this challenge. I will stay at camp and enjoy the experience as much as possible. I wipe away the tearful evidence and head back into Cameron. My team checks on me after pulling out the win. Two guys come up and share stories of tearing their Achilles at previous camps—and coming back to play again.
Then Coach K sees me hobbling from across the court and makes a beeline toward me. The last time I spoke with him was just about at this exact spot in 1993 when my friend Rob and I snuck onto the court with beers to soak up the majesty of Cameron on the night before a big game. He surprised us in our moment of guilt+awe but just smiled and asked how our “studying” was going.
Today he kindly asks how I’m feeling and if there’s anything he can do to help. He would later follow up with a handwritten note and a personal phone call—which was particularly fun because I was in a meeting with my boss when he called, and I got to say, “Sorry, I need to take this. It’s Coach K.”
I decide to learn from the experience, and after months of physical therapy, I change my exercise routine to add flexibility (yoga) and strength (weights). And I use the time sitting with my leg elevated to start practicing meditation, eventually leading to some of the personal improvements I’ve mentioned here. I’m now mentally and physically healthier than I’ve been in a long time.
Life is a game. You might as well play.
As always, thank you for reading and sharing my posts. The more subscribers I get, the more motivation I have to keep writing!
Bob Gilbreath is a 2x-exit entrepreneur and co-founder of Hearty, a curated matchmaking service that combines top software developers with early-stage, venture-backed startups.