Have you ever heard the saying, “You have to walk before you can run?” It sounds logical, but Tony Stark, from the Iron Man movie flips it around, and in this post I get into what entrepreneurs can learn from this different way of thinking.
Tony Stark has said, “Sometimes we must learn how to run first before we can walk.” I think that quote has so much to do with startup entrepreneurs. Here’s why.
When you’re a startup entrepreneur you don’t have the luxury of pondering about your next move and taking two weeks to decide what to do. You don’t have the luxury of saying, “Maybe. . . maybe not.” As a start up entrepreneur, every day you’re one day away from being out of business. Big businesses have the luxury of sitting around and taking six months thinking about their next move.
Now as a startup entrepreneur you do have some benefits. You’re nimble and can make moves faster than big businesses that have to go through a lot of different boards and organizations, approvals and sign offs; you don’t need to do that. You can simply make your next move.
Sometimes I see startup entrepreneurs worrying about what bigger companies have that they don’t. But you don’t have time to worry about what resources bigger businesses have that you don’t. You’ve just got to make your next move.
At the beginning you may not have a lot of fancy weaponry, but it’s kind of like a game; the better you do and the more battles you win, the better weapons you get. You get stronger weapons and stronger tools. And eventually, you can call time outs and say, “Let’s think about this next move. Let’s think about that next move. Let’s put a team to come out with the best strategy for this.” But you have a long ways to go to get to where you can stop and walk instead of running.
So your best friend as a startup entrepreneur is being as urgent as you can be. Remember, as Tony Stark has said, “Sometimes we must learn how to run first before we can walk.”
