The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers

by Ben Horowitz

The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal. The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal. The hard thing isn’t hiring great people. The hard thing is when those “great people” develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things. The hard thing isn’t setting up an organizational chart. The hard thing is getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed. The hard thing isn’t dreaming big. The hard thing is waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare.

That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them.

There are no shortcuts to knowledge, especially knowledge gained from personal experience. Following conventional wisdom and relying on shortcuts can be worse than knowing nothing at all.

Over the years, I worked hard to avoid being influenced by first impressions and blindly adhering to convention.

I think this is why I and Eko are so different. I grew up reading and being taught that we need to witheld judgement on first impression. Only form judgement when enough evidence has come to light. Eko on the other hand uses his “premonition” a lot. One can learn form the other of course, that I need to listen to my instinct more (like in business), and he to realize he is not always correct.

Former secretary of state Colin Powell says that leadership is the ability to get someone to follow you even if only out of curiosity.

In particularly dire circumstances when the “facts” seemed to dictate a certain outcome, I learned to look for alternative narratives and explanations coming from radically different perspectives to inform my outlook. The simple existence of an alternate, plausible scenario is often all that’s needed to keep hope alive among a worried workforce.