moving; it will quickly turn into mental warfare and you’ll feel like a hamster on a treadmill. You will slowly but surely frustrate yourself and doubt if the progress you’ve made is good enough.
You must know when to hold out for the right opportunity. Think of your life as an ecosystem—each part has to work to the benefit and betterment of the other.
Identifying and Establishing Your Non-Negotiables
Non-negotiables are the theoretical underpinning of what enables us to accept responsibility and accountability with ease and joy. You should establish this set of rules, both professionally and personally, to help you maintain your inner compass. These guidelines should motivate you toward bigger and better things, and they should help you achieve happiness and preserve your sanity despite difficult situations. It’s important to take the time to establish your list of non-negotiables so you are prepared and resolute when the time comes.
My non-negotiables are the foundations and moral basis for my decisions and they determine if and how I am incentivized. My non-negotiables are the rules I am not willing to break. They help me to maintain the level and type of autonomy that I know I need to make me happy and thrive under the most pressured circumstances.
Everyone’s non-negotiables are different. What are yours?
To me, the best entrepreneurs know how to spot an opportunity and they understand the value of seizing the moment; the advantages of being the first to make a move or get in on the deal early; and they understand the importance of adaptability, which is always necessary along the way. Again, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need a plan. Opportunities rarely come out of nowhere. It can take many years of hard work, planning, and preparation to be in the right place at the right time so that when that opportunity comes down the road you’ll be able to act on it.
In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown and Company, 2008), Malcolm Gladwell presented the idea that to get to the top in your chosen field, you’ve got to devote at least ten thousand hours of your life to that pursuit. Ten thousand hours works out to about five years of full-time practice, laser-focused on a particular skill or area of expertise—or, that works out to 2.75 years if you’re a real go-getter working fifteen-hour days, five days a week, and taking two to three weeks of vacation each year. When you put it in these terms, imagine how many industries you could be an expert in within a single lifetime, excluding, of course, mastering love, parenthood, and the greatest joys of your personal life.
Being prepared to act on an opportunity has nothing to do with luck, but it has everything to do with having the wherewithal—mental, financial, or whatever—to be ready, willing, and able to act on that opportunity.
No matter how successful you may think you are, the fact is you’re always adapting. In his book, The Start-Up of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career (Crown Publishing Group, 2012), LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman discusses the concept of permanent beta. According to Hoffman, the best entrepreneurial career strategy is one that emphasizes being adaptable and light on your feet while also planning smart. The idea is to pick a market or industry that accounts for your existing competitive assets, aspirations, and market needs; launch a thought-out Plan A on a leap of faith; and then systematically experiment and adapt as you accumulate lessons, pivoting to a Plan B as necessary. Entrepreneurs are always a work in progress; they are in permanent beta.
I never know what’s going to happen on the other end of a phone call or an e-mail. I always have to be prepared. For years I’d been thinking about starting a business in the beauty industry, but I hadn’t found the right opportunity.
What I’ve learned about business from my colleagues…
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of WordPress, is one of the most humble geniuses I know. He has a clear vision and no one can derail his focus. I admire his dedication to creating a business with longevity and relevance in an era of entrepreneurs who want to get rich fast and move on. Here is his advice on business:
1 Work with the best people you can find, whether they’re your friends or not.
2 Be impeccable in your word. If you demonstrate accountability, it will inspire others to do the same.
3 I’ve been working on WordPress for ten years now, and I plan to do it for at least ten more.
4 I’m patient, and I don’t mind working on the same problem for years at a time.
5 Don’t run out of money.
6 The people I work with have had the greatest impact on my own success.
In June 2013, my opportunity magnet went into high gear when I met Ido Leffler, cofounder of Yes To Inc., a natural-beauty-products company that’s the number two natural brand in the United States; you can find Yes To … products in more than twenty-eight thousand stores in twenty-five countries—including Walmart, Walgreens, and Whole Foods Market.
Ido and I are connected through many of our entrepreneur networks—we have at least fifty colleagues and friends in common—and it was very easy for us to vet each other. We quickly discovered that, for the past couple of years, we’d both been thinking about starting a new business—one that would introduce a ground-breaking line of beauty products. Given our mutual interests, we decided to see if we could combine our energies and talents and networks to create something fun, new, and interesting.
So, I flew to San Francisco, where Yes To Inc. has its headquarters, to meet with Ido. When I arrived, I didn’t really know what the plan was for our day other than that my day was going to be spent with Ido. We were going to see if we liked each other and if we could make our concept work and if we could make it have life and breath and vision.
We immediately started discussing creating a line of beauty products for women—Ido and I are real go-getters in every sense of the word, so it didn’t take us long to create our list of products. Ido also asked me to create a list of must-haves for myself as a founder and also for myself as a woman who knows the market. Soon we were in Union Square doing market research, walking from Bloomingdales to Target to Walgreens, checking out existing products.
After our market research in Union Square, our next stop was the Yes To Inc. office and then we headed to lunch and began to map out what this company would look like. We discussed the details of selecting and trademarking a name, moving forward with branding based on that name, researching the products that we wanted, and creating and testing products. We asked: What does the market have and not have and really need? Where do most women shop? What are the must-have products? We made a list of key roles that we would need for our founding team—the positions and which departments these positions would be in, and then we literally plugged in people from our respective networks that we’d immediately turn to for consultation or full-time employment. We did the same for an advisory board, deciding which perspectives would be of value, as well as the people who could bring them to us. We wrote that down and then made a list of people to reach out to. We talked through our marketing strategy, our distribution strategy—the whole nine yards.
Throughout the day, we further developed our idea. We headed to Factory Zero, a unique live-work facility for entrepreneurs who are creating new businesses. The resident entrepreneurs live upstairs and work downstairs; if you have a meeting, you have it in one of the downstairs workspaces or on the patio.
We dove into phoning our respective networks, saying, “Hey, I’m working on a top-secret company. It’s in this genre, and it’s with this individual. Will you advise, will you this, will you that, will you get prepared and know that I’m going to ask more of you? I’ll share more about what’s going on in thirty or sixty
