1: “The hard thing isn’t setting a big, hairy, audacious goal,” Ben Horowitz writes in The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers.
“The hard thing is laying people off when you miss the big goal,” Ben notes.
Not the hard thing: Hiring great people.
The hard thing: “When those ‘great people’ develop a sense of entitlement and start demanding unreasonable things,” he observes.
Not the hard thing: Setting up an organizational chart.
The hard thing: “Getting people to communicate within the organization that you just designed,” Ben writes.
Not the hard thing: Dreaming big.
The hard thing: “Waking up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat when the dream turns into a nightmare,” Ben writes.
2: Ben doesn’t buy into many of the popular ideas about leadership.
“The problem with these books is that they attempt to provide a recipe for challenges that have no recipes,” he writes.
The reality is, there is no “recipe” for really complicated circumstances.
“There’s no recipe for building a high-tech company,” Ben suggests. “There’s no recipe for leading a group of people out of trouble; there’s no recipe for making a series of hit songs; there’s no recipe for playing NFL quarterback; there’s no recipe for running for president; and there’s no recipe for motivating teams when your business has turned to crap.”
Hence the title of his book: “That’s the hard thing about hard things—there is no formula for dealing with them,” he notes.
3: While there is no clear-cut recipe to deal with the hard things, Ben believes “there are many bits of advice and experience that can help with the hard things.
“I do not attempt to present a formula in this book,” he explains. “Instead, I present my story and the difficulties that I have faced. As an entrepreneur, a CEO, and now as a venture capitalist, I still find these lessons useful—especially as I work with a new generation of founder-CEOs.”
Building a company is hard. There will be hard times.
“I’ve been there; I’ve done that,” Ben notes. “Circumstances may differ, but the deeper patterns and the lessons keep resonating.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: When my plans go sideways and the “hard things” show up, how willing am I to face them directly rather than look for a neat formula or easy answer?
Action: Identify one tough leadership challenge I am currently avoiding and take the next concrete step to address it this week, even if the path forward feels uncertain.