TLDR: World-class resilience, and nothing less.
Did you watch Casey Neistat’s new video last week?
I embedded it below. And I’ve written about this topic before.
The mentality that failure is not an option.
VC’s will talk about grit, tenacity, ambition, first principle thinking, founder market fit, and all sorts of terminology for identifying the best founders, but the thing is, those are just nebulous and subjective terms, and even if you could accurately account for those traits, it still wouldn’t be enough.
There are certain people who simply cannot let go of an idea or a dream. Their belief in something and in themselves is beyond what others can comprehend. They don’t just believe that they can bend the world, they know they can.
These are the people who feel an intrinsic need to persist no matter what. The people who are willing to exhaust their full potential to make something happen, and the ones who approach every obstacle as an opportunity to problem solve rather than tap out.
They’re the ones who are here by choice, and to them, giving up is the bigger failure than failing itself.
People hate to admit this, but giving up is almost always within your control, no matter how hard things become.
Take fundraising for example. There are billions of people on this planet, yet some (tourist) founders give up after 100 investor calls. Put bluntly, that’s just weak. For the founders I work with, that would be like giving up after 8 days of work. Can you even imagine?
Success is not a matter of if something is possible, it’s a matter of making things happen. It’s a matter of developing discipline and finding the limits of your fortitude.
Casey Neistat has this elusive trait, and if anyone out there knows how to test for and identify it, call me, I want to hire you.
See you Monday.