Guts

“A lot of people run a race to see who is fastest. I run to see who has the most guts.” Prefontaine

Consistently producing mega-value through disruptive innovation is the best way to live your professional life, no doubt about it. Nothing will provide more fulfillment, upward mobility, and compensation. But it’s not easy.

Normal people naturally revert toward the status quo, which means you are going to face a lot of resistance on your journey. When job hunting, you will have gatekeepers who do not understand you and will try to block you from the hiring manager who does understand you. When you are outperforming your peers, you may face derision over your rock star status. And when you are pitching disruptive ideas, you will most certainly face a tough combination of apathy, fear, and politically based resistance that you must overcome.

This is why normal people stay normal. Most of them are intelligent and have great ideas, but ideas and smarts cannot defeat the evils described above. To be a disrupter, it takes guts.

When you have guts, you have perseverance. You hear the word no consistently, but you don’t lose confidence in your ideas, analyses, or abilities.  You realize you are running a marathon and will come out ahead in the end, and your detractors won’t finish the race at all; they will be lying and groaning in a ditch on the side of the road.

If you ever find yourself discouraged, remember your greater purpose: to be the one who makes your company and customer better. When you achieve it, the reward will be a thousand times greater than the obstacles you face now. Just show some guts and you will get there.

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