"Why" really matters.
In a recent post on Inc.com, Joel Spolsky recalls asking Jessica Livingston (author of Founders at Work) to speak about why start-ups fail. "That would be boring," she told him. "They all fail for the same reason: People just stop working on their business."
Spolsky goes on. "The more I thought about it," he says, "the more I realized Jessica was onto something. Why do start-ups fail? As she pointed out, it's usually a collapse of motivation -- everyone wanders back to civilian life, and the start-up ends, not with a bang but a whimper."
Think about that. "People just stop working on their businesses."
Wow. They just plain run out of gas. They exhaust their supplies of MOXIE.
And their underlying Motivation is insufficient to revitalize their spirits. They lack the deep, personal commitment to some powerfully motivating outcome that empowers a person to persevere in the face of mind-numbing disappointments and frustrations.
This is why preachers like me place so much emphasis on the "why" of it all. Starting a business is actually relatively easy. Nurturing it to success, on the other hand, is very, very hard.
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