Selecting for Commitment

Startupify.Me

Brydon

I work on 20Skaters, ThreeFortyNine, Ontario Startup Train and a few others. My vanity site is brydon.me.

There’s a cool thread in The Talent Code about how foot speed is determined by your birth order. Your chances of being fast increase if you have older siblings and the author backs this up with stats from current 100 meter dash champions and NFL running backs.

The point is that commitment, motivations and primal cues matter. People with older siblings are sent the primal cue “you’re behind — keep up!”. We tend to view attributes like foot speed to be gifts that we have or have not. What Daniel is hoping to illustrate is that success comes from practice + commitment. Commitment is less about a conscious decision than it is driven by some primal cue deep within us. You can’t fake it. You may not be able to simulate it.

It reminds me of ideas. I cringe when someone says “you’re an ideas guy”. That is not a compliment. I don’t argue the point but instead work harder to have that person say “you’re an execution guy” tomorrow.

Or when someone asks for input on their latest idea, I rarely comment on the idea itself but simply respond “what are you willing to risk for this idea?” or “what are you prepared to do to make this happen?” Ideas are worthless, ideas are powerless. Risk and commitment are requirements to create anything great. The measure of an idea is how many pounds of flesh you’re willing to give for it. The more you’re willing to risk, the more excited I am to help you!

Commitment + practice = the chance of great success

So Startupify is built to provide you deep practice in finding real problems that are solvable in scalable, accessible markets. That gets you the practice but where does the commitment come from? That comes from you, our cohort, which puts us in a seemingly unique position of needing to find and vet people by commitment not skills or degrees attained.

How much does this opportunity really mean to you? What are you really willing to do for this? We need to find people who will do whatever it takes to get into the startup game. I’ll be honest, I have no idea how we do that. Any ideas, please let me know??