Darviridis
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9 months ago Be the steward of perspective. The middle of a venture is like a lengthy road trip without windows. It is psychologically torturous to travel without any sense of where you are along the way—no sense of progress or landmarks—and without a sense for how many miles remain. Your concept of time becomes warped, and impatience stews. Teams need to be reminded where they are and what progress they are making. As a leader, you are your team’s window. You need to call out and describe the landmarks that you pass along the way, constantly reinforce the terrain you have already covered, and prepare folks for the map ahead. Reporting facts and managing expectations are only a small part of this job. More important, you are a storyteller. Your job is to make history more interesting and relevant when retold than when it happened. After all, the middle of a journey is a blurry, mundane landscape. To get through the tremendous voids of nothingness in between the milestones, provide guidance. You’re the narrator of this journey. People who worked with Apple founder Steve Jobs over the years often talked about how his “reality-distortion field” could alter his team’s perspective, assumptions, and limits to allow for new ideas. Perhaps Jobs believed in his vision so much so that the reality around him was distorted by the power of his conviction? When you’re articulating a vision and set of assumptions with such passion and confidence, reality starts to bend your way. You’re not lying or manufacturing perspective—you’re merchandising your perspective. You’re not creating a story that you think others will believe—you’re retelling the same story you tell yourself. The same forces can help a team endure another form of reality: work with no end in sight. In this case, your reality-distortion field shows people hope when they can’t see it for themselves. For example, you may see these tough days you’re currently enduring as character building for your team and as a source of defensibility for your product—even though it currently feels anything but. Are you lamenting a lack of progress or celebrating your survival and newfound strength? Are you merchandising hard work as tiring or as achieving defensibility in your market? As you summarize your team’s exhaustive work and struggles over the months or years that have passed, conjure up the perspective that excites you the most, and then share it. Storytellers make the past relevant to the future, even when it is dry and irrelevant. Likewise, it is your responsibility to steward perspectives when you’re not even sure the conversation will end in a solution. Some of the best conversations are ones that are not trying to answer a “yes or no” question. In such conversations, instead of prompting closure, your goal should be to lead your team through a process of self-discovery. Conversations with no near-term actions or solutions reveal the surface area of the issue—blind spots, wrinkles, and unexpected edges. But, if nothing else, the ongoing discussion supplants ambiguity and any “elephants in the room” by keeping the team engaged and motivated. By participating, everyone feels more in control of their destiny. Especially when failures or major setbacks occur, you need to carry your team through it. For example, imagine working years to launch your product to much fanfare and then suddenly having your product shut down by the government for a couple of years. That’s exactly what happened to Anne Wojcicki, CEO and cofounder of genetic testing company 23andMe. Founded in 2006, 23andMe allowed customers to spit in a small tube and, within a few weeks, get access to a wealth of genetic information about their ancestors, predisposition to health issues, and other insights based on their genes. The company thrived in its early years, attracting excited customers and some of Silicon Valley’s greatest investors. But then, in 2013, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) abruptly ordered 23andMe to discontinue marketing its personal genome service, based on concerns about the potential consequences of customers receiving inaccurate medical results. For two years, the company conducted the necessary research and addressed the FDA’s concerns, until October of 2015, when 23andMe announced that it would be offering a revised health component with FDA approval. In retrospect, this major blow to the business and the team’s morale may be nothing more than a blip in the company’s early history. But how do you manage such a setback when it happens? As Anne recalls, the team was so bought into the mission that they were largely undeterred. “The more passionate you are about the cause, the less hard it is,” she explains. “When you have so much conviction that you’re doing the right thing, you see such a challenge as part of the process rather than a road block. We were used to people not understanding us or not liking us, so our attitude was always ‘We need to prove it to them’ versus ‘What are we doing wrong?’ With enough conviction, you can cut through ambiguity.” As for helping a team reach and sustain enough conviction to endure such setbacks, Anne believes it comes down to the people you hire, how you communicate, and decisiveness. “From the very beginning, we’ve wanted people that really believe in the mission. If you have FOMO [“fear of missing out”], go elsewhere. We are impacting lives of people and transforming health care. Everyone here knows the mission and my job is to reflect it. During regulatory challenges, we didn’t lose many people. I would go around the company and remind people, ‘We’re on the right side of history.’ This was our mantra, and we needed to take another path forward . . . it was a matter of our first path being wrong, never our mission being wrong. We wavered only on how we were going to get there but not the endpoint.” By luring new employees with your mission, as opposed to flashy titles or the best compensation package, you’ll build a more durable team that is willing to try different paths to achieve the mission they signed up for. But still, your perspective during the most difficult times will help your team defy their own self-doubt. When distractions and drama arise, acknowledge them, and then recontextualize them so that the suffering pales in comparison to the broader opportunity before you. Remind your team why you’re all there. They signed up to work with you because they believe in your vision and want to make something extraordinary. Your story has more gravity than you realize. Your job is to help your team make sense of the strategy—what they’re seeing, doing, and working toward. You are the steward of your team’s perspective, and there is always a way forward so long as you explain it.
Leave every conversation with energy. Whether you’re building a new business or transforming an old one, you’ll face an endless battery of painfully long conversations that have no outcome. Unresolved conversations are draining. People want resolution, and they want the confidence and motivation that comes along with a clear plan. As a leader, you can’t always provide answers. And you shouldn’t, as the correct solution may still be premature. But what you can do is always add energy. This ability to turn negative conversations into positive ones is a trait I’ve always admired. My former colleague David Wadhwani is especially adept at this. Before he became CEO of AppDynamics, an enterprise software company in Silcon Valley, David ran the digital media portion of Adobe when I joined the team after Behance’s acquisition. At the time, the company had just begun a historic transition from being a traditional software company that sold boxed software to being a services company that offered customers a series of services for a monthly fee. Adobe was one of the very first publicly traded software companies to make this transition and faced tremendous risk in doing so. David had the difficult task of leading teams of Adobe veterans, most of whom had been at Adobe more than a decade, to make the requested changes to their products. While the company had changed directions, many in the ranks were still resistant. The implications were far reaching, and some product leaders were neither prepared nor willing to rethink their products. The teams were not equipped for the onslaught of challenges. Every Tuesday at David’s staff meeting, we would untangle these problems and discuss paths to resolution. We usually realized that things would get worse before they got better. Many meetings, every option was a bad option, but we just needed to take the steps to keep pushing forward. Despite the circumstances and solemn sense of many of these meetings, David had a way of leaving every meeting on a high note. He would acknowledge the challenges before us while reminding each team why their work was important and what success would eventually look like. Even after painful meetings that lasted multiple hours without any sense of closure, David still managed to bring it together at the end in a way where we all left with energy—something along the lines of, “Hey, I know this is rough and we’ve got some serious work to do, but I also know we’ve got a good plan and the right people,” and adding something funny and uplifting at the end. Your job is to be an energy giver rather than taker, which is common among founders and leaders I admire. Chief among them is Jon Steinberg, the former president of BuzzFeed who went on to found the news media network Cheddar. Those who know Jon will attest that he is a force of nature. Every team pep talk is an infusion of energy and insight about why the “old model” of cable news is wrong and why Cheddar is the pioneer for the future of the industry. If an idea from his team is great, he’ll turn the company on a dime to make it happen. Having served on Jon’s board, I have witnessed firsthand how he motivates his team, board members, and clients. The common theme across interactions with Jon is that he’s all-in, all the time. When Dunkin’ Donuts became a big Cheddar client, Jon started wearing Dunkin’ apparel, catering every meeting with Dunkin’ Donuts and coffee, and sharing weekend shots of his family at Dunkin’ on Instagram. What better way to infuse energy into a partnership and send a clear message to current and prospective clients that Cheddar values loyalty and service? He turns every milestone into a source of energy rather than a celebration. When a record is broken, he’ll follow with something like “That looks pretty fucking awesome to me. Who else is achieving these goals on average? Nobody. Look at that trend line. . . . I know it’s a lot of stress, but it’s working. Hold yourself and your colleagues and me accountable for great content AND views AND deals AND more hours of LIVE! . . . Let’s push harder, fight harder, keep the trend going!” When you leave a meeting with Jon, or read an email from Jon, you have more energy than when you started. Your team needs energy transfusions, especially in the middle miles when circumstances feel dire and there is no end in sight. Acknowledge the trials and uncertainty you’re facing, followed by reiterating your plan of how to climb out, what you’re aiming to achieve, reminding your team why you’ve come together to do that, and then add your own enthusiasm and confidence. In the final moments of every meeting and communication, you need to reiterate purpose and leave people with the energy to achieve it.
hen I set off to write a book about the middle of bold projects and entrepreneurial journeys, you might expect that I started with my own. Having endured five years “bootstrapping” my own business and facing my fair share of challenges as an entrepreneur, this was my chance to share everything I learned. But I couldn’t remember anything. It wasn’t memory loss—it was just all a big blur. So I turned to the common source of answers to random ponderings these days: my phone. I flicked through years of random photos taken, back to the middle years of building Behance, my first company, hoping to jog my memory. I founded Behance in August 2006 and signed the documents to be acquired by Adobe in December 2012, so I made my way to 2009 on my phone, the absolute middle of my middle. Thousands of thumbnail images showed screenshots taken on my phone of website errors, bad copy, social media mentions of us and competitors, and various product ideas and changes. These screenshots spanned years and, in some months, outnumbered my photos. The sheer volume of them reminded me of falling asleep every night scrutinizing our product, anxiously looking for something but never knowing exactly what. I also found another type of screenshot—customer messages and feedback. I remember capturing these insights to share with my team, but also I needed them. I wanted to hold on to and extend some early semblance of reward and significance at a time when nobody seemed to care. Scrolling a little farther, I saw a reunion with college friends and then a special moment from my honeymoon during which my wife and I encountered elephants in Thailand. I was surprised to see how strained my smile looked. The memory rushed back, and I recalled the tension of wanting to relish this once-in-a-lifetime moment while realizing I had a team at home running on fumes and I was just a few months away from missing payroll. Being away from the team felt utterly irresponsible, and this burden followed me everywhere. Scrolling farther now, I stumbled on a team event at a restaurant kitchen where we all cooked a meal together—we couldn’t afford it, but I knew the only thing that mattered was keeping the team together. As I scrolled through our team pics, I was struck by how close and dedicated we became despite the circumstances and our differences. When the odds are against you, without revenue or margin to protect you, teams and relationships are different. It’s not work; it’s survival and self-discovery. These photos reminded me just how exhausted and uncertain I had been —fueled by my relentless determination to make something awesome. Perhaps, in such periods of struggle, our preoccupations and emotions take up so much mind share that the events themselves become a blur? Or perhaps we don’t remember the middle because we don’t want to? • • • ou’re probably reading this book because you’re about to embark on a massive journey—or are already trekking through the middle of one. Whether you’re a writer, start-up entrepreneur, big-company innovator, or an artist, you share many of the same hopes and fears. You might be working within a multinational company, a small nonprofit, a new creative studio, or on your own. No matter what it is you’re trying to create or transform, the myth of a successful journey is that it starts with the excitement of an idea, followed by a ton of hardship, and then a gradual and linear rise to the finish line. But no extraordinary journey is linear. The notion of having a bold idea and making consistent incremental progress is impossible. Those seeking a linear journey with less instability can still be successful, but they often struggle to create anything new. In reality, the middle is extraordinarily volatile—a continual sequence of ups and downs, expansions and contractions. Once the honeymoon period of starting a new journey dissipates, reality hits you. Hard. You feel lost and then you find a new direction; you make progress and then you stumble. Every advance reveals a new shortcoming. Major upsets give rise to new realizations that lead to breakthroughs in progress. At best, you move two steps forward, one step back—at worst, you realize you’ve been walking the wrong path entirely for months. This is what that journey actually looks like. I’ve come to call the journey of creation one of “relative joy.” Your job is to endure the lows and optimize the highs in order to achieve a positive slope within the jaggedness of real life—where, on average, every low is less low than the one before it, and every subsequent high is a little higher. In the moment, you can see only the uphill or downhill in front of your nose, but over time, you come to recognize that there is a median that keeps you moving forward in the right direction. The volatility of this tug-of-war is hard to stomach. You must pay less attention to the day-to-day incremental advances and more on achieving an overall positive slope. And that’s entirely determined by how you navigate the messy middle.
IT’S NOT ABOUT THE START AND FINISH, IT’S ABOUT THE JOURNEY IN BETWEEN.
here are just a handful of thrilling and treacherous moments as an entrepreneur. Most of them happen at the start or finish of the journey (or one of the restarts or false finishes along the way). They’re all we talk about, but they reveal very little about the journey itself. We love talking about the starts. The start is romantic. We love talking about it because it is inspiring without the complication of substance and strife. Conception is an adrenaline rush fueled by grandiose visions paired with naivety. You’re inspired by a destination and have no idea how you’ll get there. The solution in your mind’s eye is rose colored. You don’t yet know how the cards are stacked against you. In this case, ignorance is not only bliss but also enables you to dream up solutions at the edge of reason. You’re untethered. We also love talking about finishes. We imagine the rush, the exhaustion, and the pride of finally making it. This is what we dream of throughout the struggle of creating, isn’t it? How relieved we’ll be when the workout is finally over. A “finish” can happen at different parts of a journey: Launching a product. Publishing a book. Raising money. Reaching a key milestone. Being acquired. Shutting down. Going public. Closing the quarter. The press likes to write these headlines and we like to read them. But the superlatives obscure the fact that they are simply abstract mile markers. We learn very little from these moments despite their gravity. One of the strangest parts of being an entrepreneur is being part of a community obsessed with starts and finishes. Investors tend to be interested only in starts (when they’re able to invest) and finishes (when they get a return). Similarly, stories tend to be written only about public inflections. Even between entrepreneurs or big company CEOs, what is intended as a network of support becomes an echo chamber. Nobody wants to talk about their self-doubts and the insecurities that fuel them. Every business is “going great” until it fails. The bumps along the road are endured in isolation. The majority of the journey itself is unchronicled because it is unappealing and too revealing. As a young entrepreneur, the focus on starts and finishes always bothered me. As a manager, I sought to hire people who were seeking a journey rather than a particular outcome. The more immersed I became in the start-up world, the more I wanted to operate without sensationalism.
T When the journey feels gritty and real, your potential becomes more tangible. Then I went to work as an investor with dozens of entrepreneurs at all different stages of company building, where it became clear how destructive the spotlight on starts and finishes really is. As we celebrate the success of others, we’re liable to draw lessons from a drastically edited story that excludes the middle. What’s in the middle? Nothing headline- worthy yet everything important. Your war with self-doubt, a roller coaster of incremental successes and failures, bouts of the mundane, and sheer anonymity. The middle is seldom recounted and all blends together in a blur of exhaustion. We’re left with shallow versions of the truth, edited for egos and sound bites. Success is misattributed to the moments we wish to remember rather than those we choose to forget. Worst of all, when everyone else around us perpetuates the myth of a straightforward progression from start to finish, we come to expect that our journey is meant to look the same. We’re left with the misconception that a successful journey is logical. But it never is. Don’t let others’ stories pervert your understanding of the journey. Emulating someone else’s story is following a playbook without all the pages in the middle. We don’t talk about the messy middle because we’re not proud of the turbulence of our own making and the actions we took out of despair. Sharing our challenges shakes our egos. And finally, the middle of a journey doesn’t make for good headlines. The middle isn’t pretty, but it is illuminating and full of essential realizations to finish whatever it is you set out to start. It’s time we start talking about it. • • • he journey to create a product or service is reflected in the outcome in ways you may not even expect. It matters, tremendously. Consider a product you use in your everyday life—is it simple or complicated? Too many features or just the functionality you need? Is it enjoyable or is it a chore? The experience of using someone else’s creation comes from the path the creator took to make it. It is not the plastic, metal,or pixels that make a successful product or service. Rather, it is the thoughtfulness and tough choices made by the makers—the team dynamic, the perseverance, the organizational design (and redesigns), the constraints, the battles fought, and the values that governed the path taken. This book is about mining every insight from the volatility and the depths of despair to improve your team, product, and self. This book is also intended to help you survive the creative process when you lack any sense of traction, recognition, or significance. A few years ago I set out to understand what founders and other leaders of bold new projects do throughout their journeys that they don’t talk about. I sought to chronicle the pain-management techniques, the tactics for optimizing, and the instincts that not only help their teams survive the journey from start to finish but also thrive. This book is the culmination of seven years’ worth of scribbled notes, mobile memos captured on the run, and one-liners committed to memory. It covers insights witnessed and realized in boardrooms, on midnight calls with teams solving a crisis, during sleepless nights fretting difficult decisions, in brainstorming sessions with entrepreneurs, and often in the reflective haze of long-haul plane flights. The perspectives in this book are derived from experiences with many different people and teams, from entrepreneurs to writers from small agencies and start-ups to billion-dollar companies transforming their industries. When a tactic or tenet fascinated me, I’d capture it and share it with others for feedback or better ideas, and the ones that made the cut are in this book. The following pages cover insights garnered from interviews, from my own struggles and relative triumphs, and from working alongside the many entrepreneurs I have advised over the years. While the insights are organized into sections, the book is intended to be more of a buffet than a plated six-course meal. I encourage you to navigate to whatever parts of the journey resonate most at the moment, using the table of contents. As they have for me, I hope these insights bolster your confidence, fortify your plans, and make you question your assumptions. As you seek to make an impact in what matters most to you, this book will help illuminate your path from start to finish.
I THE STORIES FALL SHORT. n 2006, I founded Behance, a company devoted to connecting and empowering creative professionals. The problem my team and I set out to solve was a simple one: The creative world was one of the most disorganized communities on the planet—there was no way to track a photographer’s work, find out who designed a particular product, or track down the motion graphics artist or creative director behind a particular campaign. We wanted to help organize creative people, teams, and the community at large. The problem was simple, but the solution was anything but. After several fits and starts, lessons learned the hard way, and five years of bootstrapping (building a business that relied on revenue rather than venture capital), we built a multifaceted business. The Behance Network grew to enable more than twelve million creative professionals to showcase their work, connect and collaborate with one another, and get jobs. Over the years, Behance became the leading online platform for creative careers and provided me with the opportunity to grow a large design and technology team. We then expanded Behance by offering content and events for the creative community, online and off-, by creating a think tank, website, and annual conference called 99U in 2007. Influenced by the famous Thomas Edison quote, “Genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration,” 99U is dedicated to the execution of ideas rather than the ideas themselves. In late 2012, Behance was acquired by Adobe, one of the world’s largest technology companies responsible for products like Photoshop, Illustrator, and the PDF (Portable Document Format), among many other products for the creative world. It was an incredible and unexpected outcome for the entire team—certainly not the one I imagined for myself when I started designing paper products and running seminars for freelance designers to pay the bills. I joined Adobe as a vice president of products, leading an overhaul of the company’s mobile and cloud asset strategies. The three years that followed were enlightening in ways I didn’t expect. I had to wind down old products, help launch new ones, and lead teams through a great deal of uncertainty and change. I left this role with an appreciation for the frictions in a big company—how they hurt, how they help, and how to keep the ship moving forward, inch by inch. Being an entrepreneur working at the intersection of design and technology brought all sorts of opportunities as an investor and adviser to help fellow entrepreneurs build their teams, brands, and products. Some of these companies, like Pinterest, Uber, Warby Parker, sweetgreen, and Periscope, are now successful operations that have, at least to some degree, accomplished what they set out to do. Others are still meandering mid- journey, enduring their rough patches and optimizing on the upswings in every way they can. But regardless of the stage, change is the only constant. After successfully seeing my own business over the finish line, and three years at Adobe, I spent a couple of years as a full-time investor, adviser, and occasional cofounder, working shoulder to shoulder with entrepreneurs and helping them navigate their own journeys. And then, at the end of 2017, I jumped back into the fray, building products and services for creative people as Adobe’s chief product officer. When sharing my story of Behance, I normally skip over the years of challenge and personal growth that existed in between the start and finish. The story I normally tell goes something like this: We bootstrapped the business for five years before one of our products, the Behance Network, eventually started to gain traction. This allowed us to raise some funding from a top-tier VC [venture capitalist] firm, which gave us the chance to build a dream team that turned our product into a ubiquitous global creative platform. When Adobe turned Photoshop and the rest of their software into a subscription service, they needed a network like ours. The timing and opportunity was great, so Adobe acquired us. It was a great outcome for the entire team, and we happily continued working together for years afterward. And boom, an entire decade of work tied with a bow. My tale sounds a lot like other pithy stories of humble beginnings, progress, and an ultimately successful outcome. But there were years at Behance when nobody beyond our team seemed to understand or care about our work. There were moments when it all seemed on the brink of falling apart. In fact, in the early days, antinausea medication was my only way to keep an appetite. Everyone doubted us—if they ever cared—and I endured bouts of self-doubt as well. Persevering long enough to transform vision into reality was harder than I ever thought it would be; anything that challenged the status quo was an uphill battle, and the natural forces of rejection that kill new ideas didn’t discriminate between the good and the bad. Innovation has a nasty headwind, rarely a tailwind. In our first year it was just four of us. We were completely unqualified for the journey ahead, but our lack of experience didn’t shake our confidence and determination, which came from our love of an idea—and the sheer ignorance for what would be required to make it happen. Matias Corea had recently arrived in New York City from Barcelona and had practiced graphic design only for a few years. When we first met, he showed me a small brochure he had designed for a saxophone manufacturer. Matias loved jazz and typography, but he had never designed a website. Dave Stein joined us straight out of college. He had studied psychology and had covered his tuition by building simple websites out of his dorm room. The showcase website on his résumé was for an erotic lingerie shop in upstate New York. Our third hire, Chris Henry, had built a few websites in the year or two since he’d graduated from college, but he had never built search applications or databases. And me? My day job was working as an associate at Goldman Sachs. I had taken some design classes in college, but I was not an engineer, and I had never led a company. I had meandered through the worlds of finance and organizational development, but my real aspiration was to create digital products and work in the creative industry. I had assembled this team of newbies to explore an idea that would connect the creative industry. The odds were most certainly against us. We didn’t know it yet, but we were embarking on a decade-long journey that would shape both us and the global creative community in unimaginable ways. So let’s get real: The pithy success stories we hear are missing something. My short story of Behance is equally puzzling. How does a team stay together for five years with no traction, barely making payroll? How do you stomach years of anonymity and blank stares when you tell others what you’re doing? How does an unqualified team recruit, manage, and retain very qualified people—often more qualified than ourselves? How do you survive long enough in an industry you know nothing about to become an expert? How do you keep changing (and often killing) parts of your business without destroying morale? And how does a team with no experience pull off something like this? The volatile terrain of the messy middle of a journey is the real story nobody talks about. Left to hack the middle of the journey on our own, we quietly endure the downs and optimize the ups as best we can. We experiment with ways to motivate our teams when problems feel insurmountable. We agonize over conflict and try to manage drama. We act as magicians, helping our coworkers feel incremental progress when there is none. The dirty little secret that entrepreneurs hate to admit is just how fine the line is between their success and failure. The middle makes and breaks you, and ending up on the right side of this line depends on how you manage everything in between. It requires immense perseverance, self- awareness, craftsmanship, and strategy. It also requires luck, harvested whenever you encounter it. As we struggle, we gain insights. Hardship forces us to optimize. Our instincts are honed and our intuitions sharpen. These gems from the journey make you more capable for whatever comes next, and in my own life, they have made all the difference.
START, ENDURE, OPTIMIZE, FINISH, THEN REPEAT. The Start The start is pure joy because you’re unaware of what you don’t know and the painful obstacles ahead. Wearing the start-up world’s equivalent of beer goggles is important at the start, because very few would ever have the tenacity to begin their journey otherwise. But after the excitement of a new idea dissipates, reality sets in. You’ll become mired in logistics and daunted by the unknown. You’ll frantically attempt to level out your overworked synapses. You’ll be in a freefall without knowing how far away the bottom is—and that’s when the headwinds kick in. Everyone will doubt you. You will struggle to see your own progress. You’ll realize that your industry, your team, and your competitors don’t like change—and society doesn’t, either. Not even your customers. And then finally: The bottom arrives, and you hit hard. After scrambling to get your bearings and not lose too much time, money, or face, you’ll look back up to see a monstrous peak in front of you. This is where the journey truly begins. The Middle: Enduring and Optimizing The middle of the journey is all about enduring the valleys and optimizing the peaks. After the joy of conception subsides, your objective is to make every setback less difficult than the one before it—and make every recovery hoist you slightly higher than where you were before. To achieve the elusive positive slope, you must endure the downs (the incremental setbacks and struggles) and optimize the ups (everything and anything that seems to be working). Your progress will feel rewarding, but only relative to your most recent struggle. The best you can do is harvest and integrate the insights you need to keep moving in the right direction up the slope. Volatility is good for velocity. The faster you move and the more mistakes you make, the better your chances of learning and gaining the momentum you need to soar above competitors. Moving fast means conducting lots of experiments—many of which will fail—and making quick turns that are liable to leave you and your team dizzy. This volatility can hurt morale and cause anxiety, but you have a better chance of extraordinary results. The middle of the journey is an excruciating struggle. But there are momentary recoveries throughout the journey that keep you going, like the sensation of seeing your team’s DNA in your product, meeting a customer who sincerely thanks you, watching a culture take shape and the people you hired evolve to become entirely different leaders . . . there are so many moments along the way that keep you going. You just need to endure the lows and optimize everything that works. The Finish Your “finish” is the final mile of your journey and the recovery time between one project and the next. It’s hard to know when you’re finished, because every project has a piece of you in it that never goes away. In this way, the finish is more a state of mind. However, there are inflections in every project where everything changes: You debut your creation to the world, you sell your company, or you publish your book. Even though the race continues, it feels like a finish because you’re no longer racing against the clock. Either the volatility P subsides or your interest ceases—or both. Your pace changes, and you finally allow yourself to take a break and make a change. Finishes come in all shapes and sizes and are never as certain (or desirable) as they seem. In fact, finishing should never be the end goal, and you shouldn’t aspire to ever feel truly “finished”; life loses value when challenge dissipates. In my own experience at Behance, our founding team didn’t have a particular finish in mind when we started. Sure, I imagined a day in the distant future when we might be profitable, have an amazing team, make a profound impact, and be running a brand and company we were proud of. But getting acquired was not even a subconscious thought within that early narrative. In the end, Behance’s acquisition provided a natural punctuation mark for the end of a chapter. Journeys have all kinds of finishes along the way, and in many respects, you’re never finished. You can always write another chapter. • • • Part of my motivation to write this book was to “out” a bold creative project or new venture for what it really is: endless endurance and optimization. I have organized the insights ahead into a section on endurance and a section on optimization—the two complementary forces that help you conquer the middle of any bold project. Fair warning, the “Endure” section will be uncomfortable and, at times, frustrating to read. Rather than sugarcoat the hurt, anguish, and doubt, I have worked to bring these emotions and painful moments to the forefront. It’s important to become familiar with these inevitable hardships and how others worked through them. When you make your way through “Endure,” you’ll be greeted by a more optimistic and actionable “Optimize” section that is all about capitalizing on your strengths and improving every aspect of your team, product, and self. Enduring and optimizing is the rhythm of making—the pattern of ups and downs that every journey takes you through. It is certainly true for your professional aspirations, but this rhythm also applies to all of life. One realization I hope you have from this book is the relationship between volatility and preparedness. The lengthy distance between where you are and where you wish to be—with all of its difficulties—is there for a reason, and the ups and downs feed each other in valuable ways. In Zen, the Buddha says you cannot travel the path until you have become the path yourself. Only by embracing the middle will you find your way through. The easiest route to take is to glide in the direction of wherever fate pushes. But living at the mercy of circumstance makes you a passive participant in your own story. Without a fight against fate (aka the status quo), you’ll never venture beyond the expected. You can stretch your potential only by enduring the volatility of the journey, by getting curious about the bumps, and by optimizing every aspect of your product, team, and self.
T ENDURE hree years in. Or maybe it was two, or four. I have no idea. The middle years all blend together. I call them the “lost years,” because Behance’s progress felt excruciatingly slow, and we learned everything the hard way. I’m surprised we survived. Our team was our own little world. We manufactured our goals and self-esteem in the same way we made our product: with imagination and poetic license. The fights and fun were all part of the drama that kept our made-up world intact. We barely had a business, and most of our customers were doing us a favor. Our relationships with one another and our sense of hope were the only things we were building with undeniable value. Nevertheless, I felt so small whenever I walked out of our office, which was a cordoned-off part of my apartment a few blocks away from Union Square. New York City was always bustling. The guy selling fruit on the sidewalk had more customers than we did. Out at night I cringed when the “what do you do?” conversation came up. I knew my answer—building a company to help organize the creative world—would get a blank stare. Would people think I got fired from my real job? If I told people my vision, would I lose respect if I failed? My family and friends always offered to help me, but there was nothing they could do. I felt the weight of every decision, and the careers of those who quit their jobs to join me, on my shoulders. My shoulders alone. When I think back to those lost years, I recall a constant somber loneliness, a suffering from the feeling that nobody else could relate. The struggle was further compounded by the optimism I had to exude to my team and potential customers and partners. My hope had to be mined deep beneath the surface of fear and reality. The juxtaposition of the intensity of a start-up and feeling invisible and despondent was soul crushing. Staying positive was exhausting, and there were times when I felt depressed. Aside from the psychological struggles, these years felt lost because we ran in circles. We had to rebuild the Behance Network’s core technology three times. We switched vendors, hired some of the wrong people, and made countless bad decisions. Keeping our product functional was a game of Whac-A-Mole: Every fix seemed to break something else. But we were determined to get it right. We didn’t make rapid progress with our product, but the hardship strengthened our resolve. As a team, and as individuals, we found a way to endure every valley we faced. The middle miles of a venture are full of ambiguity, uncertainty, fear, runarounds, crises, disagreements, and endless bouts of the mundane. Every time you untangle yourself and find your way out of a jam, you’ll fall into another one sooner than you think. These are the inevitable and seemingly endless dips of the middle that we must endure. Endurance is about much more than surviving late nights and laboring without reward. It’s about developing a source of renewable energy and tolerance that is not innate. Without any customers or evidence of progress, the continuous validation and encouragement that motivates teams will be absent. Without a steady stream of rewards, you will feel empty. You must supplement this void with manufactured optimism. You will have to endure anonymity and a persistent state of frustration. You’ll have to generate a unique and intrinsic sense of belief in yourself as you manage the blows to your plan and ego. Sure, your passion for the problem you’re solving will help. But running a marathon while hungry requires supernatural sustenance in the form of some key insights and convictions that we will discuss in this section. The line between a big win and failure is thin. You can get the important stuff right and still lose by not enduring long enough. When I recall our years of bootstrapping at Behance, I cringe thinking about just how close we came to falling apart—several times. We survived these troughs in our journey as a team. We relied on one another, managed to find levity in even the darkest moments, and hacked our own reality to endure years of struggle. The insights in the section ahead will equip you for the middle- journey turbulence. They will also remind you that you’re not alone. But we need to face the mess head-on and learn how to endure and mine the volatility. Exploring the trenches of lost hope, uncertainty, and exhaustion help make such conditions more familiar—and therefore bearable, maybe even manageable. LEADING THROUGH THE ANGUISH AND THE UNKNOWN
Short-circuit your reward system. One of the greatest motivators is a sign of progress. Hardship is easier to tolerate when your work is being recognized (either through external validation or financial rewards), but long journeys don’t show progress in the traditional sense. When you have no customers, no audience, and nobody knows or cares to know about what you’re making, the greatest motivators have to be manufactured. I would characterize much of my first few years leading my team at Behance as an adventure in manufacturing motivation. In 2007, and for a few years thereafter, we had very little traction, revenue, press, or any other traditional form of progress to celebrate. We had launched a blog and simple network for creative professionals . . . that nobody knew about or cared about. When you did a web search for Behance, the first result was Did you mean: enhance? Even Google thought we were a mistake. The traditional measures of an internet business—page views, customers, subscribers, revenue—didn’t do much for us because we were starting from nothing and struggling to exist. As the team’s leader, I tried all sorts of ways to keep the team engaged. We would make bets for when we would achieve certain milestones based on our priorities. As a lifelong vegetarian, I would commit to trying certain kinds of meat if we reached certain milestones (which the team found, strangely, motivating). We would celebrate any new customers, even if the overall numbers were tiny. We would celebrate completing a page of tasks on the wall or bashing a particularly elusive bug in the software with cheap champagne. Whatever we could repurpose as a milestone, we would. One of my favorite early manufactured milestones was overcoming Google’s Behance/enhance error message. We longed to be considered a legitimate search result. To achieve this, we needed to game the spread of “back links” to influence Google’s search algorithm. We knew that the more blog posts we wrote and the more portfolios our customers uploaded, the closer we would get to internet recognition, not by our customers, but by Google’s digital gatekeepers. The goal was short term, and the tasks to achieve it were all actionable. It would just take time and effort. “Someday,” I assured the team, “we will no longer be a mistake.” Then one day, someone on the team went to Google and gave it another go and, lo and behold, Behance came up as the first result without any prompt to correct the search query. We had won—we finally existed! It was a small win manufactured as a way to help us feel a semblance of progress, but it felt great. And then, I kid you not, in 2008, Beyoncé became popular. And we were a mistake again. Did you mean: Beyoncé? Google asked. But we were undeterred, and it was only a matter of weeks until we were, once again, a legitimate search result. It is hard to summon a sense of hope and self-worth when you’re on your own. So you squeeze out any semblance of progress you can find, and then you celebrate it. The great void of feedback and reward that early-stage start-ups must endure cannot be overstated. It is especially apparent when I attend start-up conferences like Web Summit, an annual gathering of start-ups from Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. While the United States has an established ecosystem of start-ups, incubators, venture capital firms, and angel investors, the rest of the world benefits from megaconferences like Web Summit to bring entrepreneurs and investors together. Strolling around the start-up pavilion at Web Summit, I always take heart in the literally thousands of start-ups that have a three-foot-long space to engage anyone willing to hear their pitch. It’s fun to see so many ideas in the early stages, but with all the energy I also feel the pain and despair. When you’re putting everything on the line, your business and art becomes intertwined with your identity and self- esteem. Nothing is more humbling than everyone passing by your three-foot cube that represents your future without even taking a second look. Anonymity means you can make mistakes and drastic changes to your product without disappointing anyone, but only because nobody cares. Breaking through anonymity is a game of endurance, so you have to hack your reward system so that the absent short-term rewards you typically rely on, like revenue or new customer goals, are replaced by something else. Starting at a very young age, we are trained to be governed by a powerful short-term reward system. As toddlers, we behave in ways that yield affection and instant gratification from our parents. In school, our learning is rewarded with good grades. And grades, we soon learn, yield the reward of approval from parents, teachers, and peers. When we enter the job market, we receive a monthly salary and bonuses. And as legendary venture capitalist (VC) Fred Wilson paraphrased at the 99U conference: “The two greatest addictions in life are heroin and a weekly salary.” Monica Mehta, author of The Entrepreneurial Instinct, studies the role of brain chemistry in entrepreneurship. She explains in Entrepreneur, “With each success, our brain releases a chemical called dopamine. When dopamine flows into the brain’s reward pathway (the part responsible for pleasure, learning and motivation), we not only feel greater concentration but are inspired to re-experience the activity that caused the chemical release in the first place.” This guaranteed dopamine rush and the self- confidence it provides makes short-term rewards addicting. Alternatively, “Each time we fail, the brain is drained of dopamine, making it not only hard to concentrate but also difficult to learn from what went wrong.” Thus, physiologically, we’re hardwired to have a strong preference for actions, decisions, and projects likely to yield quick wins, because delayed gratification causes anxiety and discomfort. If you consider how short life expectancy was in the dawn of humanity, it’s no surprise that we’re naturally biased toward short-term rewards. Even as late as the seventeenth century, average life expectancy in New England was twenty-five years of age, and 40 percent of people died before reaching adulthood. For early humanity, the prospect of spending five or ten years working toward an eventual outcome, however great it might be, was just not rational. No wonder it is so difficult to stay engaged with a long-term goal—we are biologically wired to abandon such efforts in exchange for shorter-term rewards. Our addiction to short-term validation is so engrained that trying to defy it is hopeless. Accept this fact. While many people paint an incredible long-term vision for their teams, the prospect of long-term rewards is insufficient for long-term motivation. It is virtuous to aspire to these goals, but a noble venture is not exempt from the need to feel incremental progress and be rewarded for it. Rather than fight the need for short-term rewards, you must hack your reward system to provide them. As you craft your team’s culture, lower the bar for how you define a “win.” Celebrate anything you can, from gaining a new customer to solving a particularly vexing problem. The problem with traditional rewards like money, which can be counted and accumulated, is that they require the least imagination. Make the most of the period in your journey when you must create your own rewards out of necessity. By doing so, you are engaging your team more dynamically than a raise or bonus ever will. Milestones that are directly correlated with progress are more effective motivators than anything else.
Don’t seek positive feedback or celebrate fake wins at the expense of hard truths. While important to celebrate and manufacture wins early on, make sure they’re not fake wins. It’s understandable to seek validation, but actively searching for positive feedback provides false positives. If you keep searching for something positive, you’ll find it—but often at the expense of more important truths. In the early days of founding Behance and helping start other companies like Prefer, a referral network for independent professionals, I found myself looking at our product analytics every day. Did more people sign up today than yesterday? Did engagement go up this week versus last week? How many more followers did we gain on Twitter? These are important metrics to track, but I was looking only for the positive trends rather than objectively reviewing all the trends. More than anything else, I wanted validation. Upon reflection from several start-up experiences, product manager and technology entrepreneur Ben Erez talked about the perils of being encouraged by positive feedback. When you’re starting a company, anything resembling positive feedback looks like a delicious steak. I’ve never enjoyed hearing how awesome my idea was than I did during the process of starting my company. I’ve never had a baby, but to me having a start-up felt a lot like showing off my new baby. You tell everyone about it like an excited parent and every single person congratulates you for the news and tells you it’s flawless. In hindsight, seeking positive feedback was toxic, because it was giving us the impression we were on the right track. To objectively observe the performance of your new creation or product, put yourself in others’ shoes. You can piece together something resembling the truth only from many different perspectives. How would a skeptical investor look at your numbers? How would an impatient new customer attempt to navigate your product? What are competitors saying about your product? Actively seek out the negative trends as well as the positive, as your longevity over time will be determined by your awareness of weaknesses as much as your strengths. It’s all too tempting to sugarcoat a bitter pill. Momentum is an especially effective distractor, as are press accolades. But finding a positive metric or getting glowing press coverage does not make a hard truth go away. Our thirst for good news means we focus on it, or worse, manufacture it. Sometimes when leaders are trying to rally confidence and support, they are actually blunting a blow that must be felt in order to feel the reality and make difficult decisions. I often see leaders circulate positive articles to their teams to overshadow larger problems facing the company. As an investor, I see this in shareholder updates from entrepreneurs running businesses I’ve supported. These updates almost always start with “Things are going really well!!” and then, buried on page 5 of the update, is the news that the team has been pared down to two people, they’ve had to move out of their coworking space, and they have five months of funding left before they stop paying salaries. “But Forbes gave us a great write-up last month!” It’s the business equivalent of the grimacing emoji. As Ben Horowitz, founder and general partner of venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, once explained in a blog on the topic, “The truth about telling the truth is that it does not come easy for anyone. It’s not natural or organic. The natural thing to do is tell people what they want to hear. That’s what makes everybody feel good . . . at least for the moment. Telling the truth, on the other hand, is hard work and requires skill.” He goes on to cite the kinds of messages that are painful to deliver, like executives quitting, a plan for massive layoffs, sales declining, and other perilous situations. “You must tell the truth without destroying the company. To do this, you must accept that you cannot change the truth. You cannot change it, but you can assign meaning to it.” Ben suggests three methods for assigning meaning to hard truths: State the facts clearly and honestly—Don’t try to say that you needed to clean up performance issues or that the company is better off without the people that you so painstakingly hired. It is what it is and it’s important that everyone knows you know that. If you caused it, explain how such a bad thing could occur— What was the decision process that you used to expand the company faster than you should have? What did you learn that will prevent it from happening again? Explain why taking the action is essential to the larger mission and how important that mission is—A layoff, if done properly, is a new lease on life for the company and an action that was necessary to fulfill the prime directive and mission that everyone signed up for. As the leader, it’s your job to make sure that the company does not let those people lose their jobs for nothing. Something good needs to come out of it. Despite the temptation, don’t focus on “good news” at the expense of what’s going south and how to deliver bad news. In a journey that is so reliant on positive energy and hope, it is vitally important to make consistent time and space where people can focus on what isn’t working. Perhaps it is a regularly scheduled monthly meeting, or a period during an off-site meeting when the team is encouraged to share their doubts. Some teams do anonymous surveys of the team’s gravest concerns and then share the results. Whatever your method, don’t gloss over the news your team needs to hear. Be up front, and then share a plan. You cannot win unless you know how you’re most likely to lose. And when you find something worth celebrating, only applaud the progress and actions you want your team to repeat. It’s dangerous to celebrate accolades or circumstances that are not linked with productivity, like getting “press” that you paid for or winning awards that are not representative of your impact. After all, the most exciting pursuits don’t yet fit in a reporter’s beat or an award category! Another example of a dangerous fake win is raising capital. Funding shouldn’t be celebrated. If anything, raising money should make you nervous: It means you have more to lose and more people you are responsible to. For strong companies, financing is a tactic. For weak companies, financing is a goal. When you use smoke and mirrors to help boost self-esteem and help your team endure hardship, you’re perverting your values. Fake wins are the reward equivalent of cocaine: They will artificially inflate morale but then take you down, perhaps lower than where you started. What should you celebrate? Progress and impact. As your team takes action and works their way down the list of things to do, it is often hard for them to feel the granularity of their progress and you need to compensate. Celebrate the moments when aggressive deadlines are met or beaten. Pop champagne when the work you’ve done makes a real impact. Even if it’s just a few customers that make use of a new product or feature, these are the real milestones you want to celebrate.
Accept the burden of processing uncertainty. We crave certainty but must learn to function without it. We want to be told that a glass of wine a day is definitely good for us, but life isn’t that simple. While searching for a definitive answer, we often cherry-pick insights from experts or studies that support the view we already hold. By avoiding uncertainty and desperately seeking a quick answer, we’re liable to embrace premature or incorrect solutions. Only by learning to tolerate uncertainty can we allow processes to play out and experiments to unfold. Emre Soyer, a behavioral scientist and assistant professor of business at Ozyegin University in Istanbul, Turkey, has studied leaders navigating uncertainty and decision making: “A leader that embraces uncertainty would be open to experiment with different ideas and let others experiment, too, rather than claiming to know the correct answer all the time.” When searching for stability, we’ll often cut corners or ignore real issues in order to stem our fear of the unknown. “We often desire that experts absorb uncertainties for us, make consistently accurate predictions and tell us what we need to do,” Soyer says. “Yet this would lead to a false sense of certainty and an illusion of control, ultimately causing us to invest in some particular strategies or treatments that may prove useless or even harmful.” Instead, we should train our brains to embrace the gray area and not be too solution driven. “One of the main responsibilities of a leader or an executive is to make good decisions,” Soyer adds. “Yet, uncertainty makes this task difficult. Claiming an unwarranted degree of control on uncertain situations can harm the reputation of the leader in the long run. Whereas a leader who is behaving in harmony with the uncertain nature of a situation would be judged as fair and competent even if sometimes the outcomes are unsatisfactory due to bad luck.” The necessary but difficult task of embracing the gray area means willingly wrestling with uncertainty on a daily basis. I struggled with this in my early years spent bootstrapping Behance, with no end in sight and no sure sense of traction. I remember many occasions when I valiantly fought to disconnect: Christmas, the week of my wedding, and even the birth of my daughter. And while I was “there” for all of these moments, 20 percent of my mind’s processing power was preoccupied. It wasn’t any specific deal or issue that stuck with me. On the contrary, it was the stuff I didn’t know that ate away at me—the “unknown unknowns.” The lack of a map for the voyage ahead caused an existential angst that meant I felt the need to live and sleep with one eye on the compass. As Ben Erez recalls from his experience, “I thought at the time that my personal life was separate from my work life, but that’s not true in entrepreneurship. When you’re building a company, the various parts of your life have a way of all meshing together into a think blend that doesn’t let you tell one part from the other. I had heard starting a company is all- consuming but the magnitude of overlap was something I was not prepared to handle.” This “think blend” is the continual processing of open questions without absolute solutions. In many ways, the continual processing of uncertainty is the one part of your “work life” you can’t turn off. There’s no shortcut to deep thinking and crunching through scenarios in the basement of your brain. So you must practice and learn to master the art of parallel processing, when you can focus on a specific problem while also churning through the omnipresent anxiety. You can quiet it down, but you can’t turn it off (and you don’t want to—you’re slow cooking your intuition). Some people I know practice meditation, and some pride themselves on being able to ruthlessly compartmentalize. What I try to do is remind myself that I need to be present with my team, focused on the problem, yet keep a pulse on the big picture. Despite what may be processing in the back of your mind, try to get curious with whatever problem or person is in front of you. Distract yourself from your own preoccupations by finding things to learn and solve. No matter what your creative endeavor is, uncertainty will be lingering around every corner. There is simply no way around uncertainty and the angst it will cause for you and your team. Strive to continually process it rather than let it cripple you, to accept the burden without surrendering your attention.
Fight resistance with a commitment to suffering. Society has a grand immune system designed to suppress new ideas. To keep the water running and sustain life’s other necessities, society’s natural resistance to ingenuity surfaces in the form of doubt, cynicism, and pressure to conform. It takes tremendous endurance to survive such resistance. In order to fight against the resistance, you’ll need more than passion and empathy. You’ll need to commit to suffering for the years required to push your idea to fruition. Not just a willingness to suffer, but a commitment. Loup Ventures investor Doug Clinton makes the case that founders must commit to suffering for at least five years. “This might sound more extreme than necessary,” he writes, “but starting a company is a roller coaster of suffering. You need to be comfortable with hearing ‘no’ over and over and not let that destroy your will. You need to be able to withstand low periods that are inevitable—unexpected customer or employee losses, investor rejections, tax bills, fights with cofounders. Entrepreneurs don’t necessarily need to revel in difficulty, but it helps. . . . It usually takes at least two years before you have any reasonable traction to show that your business might be working, then another few years of driving growth to create something that looks like a moat. Then you can afford to breathe. A little.” With a commitment to suffering, teams are able to tolerate struggle and overcome major psychological challenges like, for example, throwing everything away and trying again. When a start-up or product team realizes they’re headed nowhere and decides to change everything, the loss of years of work combined with the feeling of starting all over again is soul crushing. And yet, some of the greatest modern companies we know and love today were second incarnations of completely different ideas. YouTube was originally a dating site that never took off, despite relentless efforts to get people to sign up. Twitter started as a podcasting network called “Odeo” that was going nowhere, and Instagram’s team started with a hard-to-use check-in game called “Burbn.” Instagram as we know it today was an attempt to salvage the situation, designed with such extreme simplicity as a reaction to what they had learned the hard way with Burbn. In each of these cases, we tend to celebrate the breakthrough products without fathoming how hard it must have been to keep the faith and start from scratch. I’ve heard cofounder Kevin Systrom discuss how difficult the decision was, even though Burbn was going nowhere. Such bold moves are psychologically toiling, and while common sense may suggest otherwise, you must be committed to the suffering. Despite whatever hacks and strategies you employ, you will get burned repeatedly. Society’s immune system is powerful and indiscriminate. Suffering is inevitable, but by expecting it, you can manage your expectations and those of your team. You can build a culture that is as much about the experience building the product together as it is about the product itself. By doing so, at least you’re in your own little world suffering among friends! As you hire people to join you, you can evaluate not only their skills and interests but also their tolerance and commitment to enduring the fight against the self-doubt and gut-wrenching hardships that real life and society will throw at you.
Friction brings us closer. Our aversion to obstacles, setbacks, disagreements, and other forms of resistance is a bit ironic, because this friction is what builds our tolerance for future friction. We expend so much energy avoiding friction rather than inviting and leveraging it. The old adage “Friction polishes stones” is true: Friction not only reveals character, it creates it. By avoiding conflict, we don’t smooth out the rough edges of our ideas and plans. In Quartz, Hugo Macdonald, the former design editor of Monocle magazine, made the case for friction: The thought of friction may make us bristle, but it’s not synonymous with difficulty. The standard linguistic definition recognizes this: Friction is derived from the Latin word fricare, meaning “to rub,” and . . . generally means a force that opposes relative motion between two objects. Rubbing in opposition to something instinctively sounds like an undesirable experience—a disagreement, a struggle, a fight—and so over time, we’ve come to connote friction with negativity. But on the whole, rubbing things together creates, not destroys. Friction gives us heat and fire. It quite literally moves mountains. Rubbing two people together may cause arguments—but it also makes babies. Friction is a positive force in all walks of life precisely because it’s only when we’re in opposition to something that we learn how to move forward. In order to advance both individually and societally, we need more friction in our lives, not less. The aspiration for a “frictionless” experience is shortsighted. A truly frictionless experience, where you avoid or deny every ounce of struggle, is mindless. Friction makes you feel the texture of a process, and the texture helps you remember what you’ve experienced. Without friction, teams are liable to move too fast, and edges that are too smooth fail to form sustainable bonds. Hardship brings your team together and equips you to endure for the long haul. The upheaval of ordinary life causes a group of people to overlook their differences and unite around common causes. Bonds forged through adversity are most apparent when calamity strikes. Whether in wartime or after a natural disaster, shared struggles bring people together. I remember walking through the streets of Soho during the massive New York blackout in 2003 and saw stores giving away drinks, random civilians helping direct traffic, and everyone talking with one another. Friction unlocks the full potential of working together. When triggered, your ancestral preference for group survival through collaboration over isolation aligns interests in a powerful way. “When staying alive is not just the responsibility of the individual, but other members of the species help the individual to survive, and vice versa, all members’ chances are enhanced,” explains Richard Taflinger, a professor at Washington State University. The more a group cooperates, the more resources it can accumulate, the more territory it can defend, and the more it can protect itself from predators; those who stray from cooperation threaten the majority’s safety, motivating the majority to eliminate them. Cooperation is a natural instinct, and friction brings it to the surface. The more neurally complex the animal, the more social groups are used to enhance survival. Humans band together for physical and psychological protection. “In ancient history and prehistory, tribes gave visceral comfort and pride from familiar fellowship, and a way to defend the group enthusiastically against rival groups,” E. O. Wilson, a biologist, writes in Newsweek. “Modern groups are psychologically equivalent to the tribes of ancient history. As such, these groups are directly descended from the bands of primitive humans and pre-humans.” However complex these societal groups become, our psychology remains wired on the principle that groups equal safety. So instead of facing adversity solo, we instinctively look for groups, for comfort and restoration. Speaking on Harvard Business Review’s IdeaCast about a book he coauthored with Sheryl Sandberg—Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilience, and Finding Joy—Adam Grant, a renowned organizational psychologist and Wharton professor, describes the business incentives of group support. Studies show that when companies provided assistance programs that offer financial support and time off when employees faced unexpected adversity (such as if their home was damaged by a natural disaster or a relative fell sick), “it actually paid dividends in that people felt like they belong now to a more caring company,” Grant says. “They took pride in their employer as a really human place to work. And they were more committed as a result.” Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook COO and whose personal experience of her husband Dave Goldberg dying suddenly was the inspiration for Option B, recalls, “I never would have gotten through this without Mark [Zuckerberg]. Mark was at my house the day I came home from Mexico and told my children. Mark literally planned Dave’s funeral. And Mark was with me every step of the way. When I came back to work and felt like I was a ghost and no one would talk to me, I took refuge in his conference room. . . . We think about providing that kind of emotional support to our friends. . . . But we can also do it at work. And it makes us closer to the people we work with. And I think it builds a much stronger organization.” Groups help us manage life’s frictions, and the challenges we face bring groups together. Rather than circumventing or burying it, use the frictions you encounter to learn how to cooperate and build your team’s capacity to handle adversity. Whatever you do, don’t fear tension and confrontation. Passivity arrests your development as a team. The fights bring you a level deeper, they force you to cover more surface area of opinion so you can ultimately discover the best solution. And, often times, we desperately need the clarity that crisis provides. As the early Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius once quipped, “The impediment to action advances action. What stands in the way becomes the way.” Indeed, the frictions we encounter help us find a better way so long as we face them.