Hippie CEO Life #35 - You Can’t Do That
December 9, 2022
“To be a star, you must shine your own light, follow your path, and don’t worry about the darkness, for that is when the stars shine brightest. Always do what you are afraid to do.” ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
Throughout my career, as i’m sure has been a very similar experience for many of you, i’ve constantly been told:
“This is the wrong way!”
“You can’t do that.”
“That’s not the way it works.”
i’ve used those moments as fuel for blazing my own path, often through the darkness, in order to find a better way of doing things.
My first job out of college, we distributed our software on CDs. It was clunky, the user experience was not great, and i wanted to find a better way. i said, “i’m going to create a web client (this was in the 90’s) for our customers.” I was told, “You can’t do that, the software doesn’t support a web-based interface.” That was all the fuel i needed to figure out how to make it work, regardless of the limitations.
As i grew into leadership positions, i challenged the norms around how work was typically done. Again, i was met with the same warning, “You can’t run a team this way, you can’t trust that people will do the right thing, you can’t manage a company with rainbows and hacky sacks.” Oh yeah? Watch me!
Putting in the work to create a new company, to challenge the way consulting has been done, again the gatekeepers were there, “You can’t be successful unless you bill by the hour. You can’t offer your team unlimited time off. You can’t make any real meaningful impact on the world building a simple lifestyle business.” Aren’t you gatekeepers tired of being wrong all the time?
When you hear, “It won’t work. You can’t do it that way. That’s not the way business gets done.”, chances are you are on the verge of creating something incredibly meaningful that will change the way people work, the way customers buy, the way we “do business,” for the better.
Keep pushing.
LET’S GO!!!!
