Brushing your teeth is the secret to being successful in life and entrepreneurship. In this post, I am going to tell you why.
Brushing your teeth is not difficult. It is something we all do. But how many people do it the right way? It’s recommended that you brush your teeth twice a day, every day. There is proper form and improper form. I am sure some kinds of toothpaste are better than others, but admittedly, it can be difficult distinguishing which toothpastes are the best given that each and every one is recommended by 9 out of 10 dentists (I hope I never come across the 10th dentist. Must be a terribly negative person).
The key to dental health is consistency. You need to put in consistent effort day in and day out. Brushing your teeth for an hour at a time will not allow you to skip brushing your teeth for the next month.
Now, as much as I appreciate the importance of dental hygiene, this isn’t really a post about brushing your teeth. This is a post about life and business, two areas where we all too often brush for an hour once a month.
The key to success in life is consistent application of effort. This is true for everything from relationships and startups, to exercise and reading. Very rarely will you find yourself in situations where a single herculean effort is all that stands between success and failure. Much more often, slow and steady really does win the race.
When I was working at Carlyle the head of my team had a favorite phrase, “Do your day job.” It means taking care of the fundamentals of your role and making sure that you excel on the little things. Because if you don’t, it tends to be a slippery slope.
I am a big Broncos fan and our newest coach, Vic Fangio, put it well in his introductory press conference. When asked to explain his famous “death by inches” mantra he said:
“If you're running a meeting, whether it be a team meeting, offense or defense meeting, a position coach meeting and a player walks in, say 30 seconds late, 45 seconds late -- that act in it of itself really has no impact on whether you're going to win or lose that week.
"But if you let it slide, the next day there's two or three guys late or it went from 30 seconds to two minutes. It causes an avalanche of problems. That's 'death by inches.'”
The little things matter. Showing up consistently and putting in the effort is what makes the difference between success and failure.
No place is this truer than with startups.
On the startup battlefield, wars are not won in a decisive moment. Startup successes are a culmination of years of executing on the little things and consistently making progress. In tech, that steady progress tends to grow exponentially. This fact is sometimes hard to see among twitter hype threads and Techcrunch headlines, but the saying “an overnight success, 10 years in the making” really does ring true.
Execution is so, so key. A VC I really respect once told me that he would take a team that can execute in a small market over a team that can’t in a big market every single day of the week. Execution really is what sets apart A+ teams from the rest, and in venture you need those A+ teams to get the outcomes that justify the whole model.
You can bet that this hyper-focus on execution is something that VCs pay attention to.
A great example of this is due diligence. Due diligence is a necessary, but slow, and sometimes painful, process for everyone involved. A secret of venture capital that not many may know is that how an entrepreneur conducts themselves during due diligence, is just as big of a signal about whether the startup will be successful as anything else. An entrepreneur that is organized, prompt, respectful, and who has a masterful understanding of the ins and outs of their business during due diligence will likely exhibit that same attention-to-detail and execution mastery when it comes to running their business. Entrepreneurs who are difficult to deal with and get easily frustrated or are dodgy about direct questions about the business are unknowingly flying a pretty big red flag for all investors involved.
So now that we have agreed that consistent effort is the key to success, what is the best way to go about applying that effort?
In the immortal words of Joel Embidd:
“Trust the process”
The best way that you can ensure that you are properly applying just the right amount of force and using the proper technique when brushing your way through life is to build a process and stick to it. Our culture is far too outcome oriented. We operate on a last-in-first-out basis and optimize based on the outcomes we see, even when those outcomes are often nothing more than luck. If you flip a coin 4 times and get tails every time, you would not conclude that a coin will always land on tails. And yet, far too often our personal and professional actions are the equivalent of flipping a coin once, and assuming that every other time we ever flip a coin we will get the same result.
I have had a big focus on process ever since reading the book Chop Wood, Carry Water by Joshua Medcalf. I can honestly say this book has had a bigger impact on my life than any other. The subtitle says it all, “How to fall in love with the process of becoming great.” I highly recommend this book to any looking to lead a more process-oriented life.
My advice for you:
Focus on doing the little things right.
Fall in love with the process of becoming great. If you are able to truly do this, the outcomes will take care of themselves.
Maintain consistent effort instead of bursts of hyperactivity.
Take care of things like your health, your body, your relationships, your spirituality, and your mindset that only need a little bit of time each day to maintain and yet, are all too often neglected. These are things that are vitally important to your success in life, and yet not one of these things can be maintained by brushing for an hour once a month.
And speaking of.
Brush daily with consistent application of effort.
You’ll be surprised where you end up.