I schlep, therefore I am.
Paul Graham of YCombinator writing about founders who don’t shrink from the tedious or unpleasant aspects of the business:
A company is defined by the schleps it will undertake. And schleps should be dealt with the same way you’d deal with a cold swimming pool: just jump in. Which is not to say you should seek out unpleasant work per se, but that you should never shrink from it if it’s on the path to something great.
This reminds me of one of the best comments Kaye said while we were thinking about a big/fat/scary part of the business. I fretted about not knowing how to do something, to which she replied:
Of course you do. You just jump in. You know how to do that.
Youth, stupidity, naiveté—these are important tools in a startup (and a marriage, for that matter.) You don’t shrink from things you don’t know about. You just deal with them as they occur.
This is why I love Steward Brand’s “stay hungry, stay foolish.” You fail when you think you know everything or won’t do anything.
