The bucket & the pipeline

The reason most entrepreneurs fail is that they give up too quick. Forget the old nag ‘you only fail when you give up’ – I don’t mean that. I mean that they forget that the “context” is very different as an entrepreneur versus being an employee.

From our first job flipping burgers or whatever we chose to do while still studying we had – “Instant rewards”. Instant pay for a job done at the end of the day, week or month. It teaches us a really bad habit. We expect instantaneous benefits for effort rendered. For every bucket of water we carry we get a piecemeal wage.

As entrepreneurs we are building a pipeline. It’s a large project of capital works which takes a long time, and usually much longer than we ever expected. There are no payments along the way. In fact we get nothing until the pipeline is complete. We may run out of resources before we finish….But if we stay the course the water can come gushing.

Unfortunately we can’t know how close the pipeline is to completion. We need a bit of blind faith. But if we go the distance, we’ll never have to carry a bucket of water again.

4 thoughts on “The bucket & the pipeline

  1. So very true Steve. Sometimes it can seem like a constant uphill battle!
    Push through the struggle and go beyond where others give up.
    Focus on building the pipeline correctly the first time, not the finish line and the rewards will come.

  2. Brilliant post Steve – you’ve hit the nail on the head fair and square. It takes time to build a product, time for the early adopters to try it, time to refine it, and then more time for everyone else to find out about it.

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