You Don’t Have to Make Every Mistake Yourself

The four things every founder needs, and how to cover the ones you’re missing

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who learn from other people’s mistakes and those who don’t. Both groups learn, but one pays considerably more for the lesson.

We all learn from experience, but the experience doesn’t have to be yours.

Experiential learning is part of who we are and how we grow. We try things; they work, or they don’t; we troubleshoot, and we do it better the next time. Relying on learning through experience is a fundamental way to learn, grow, and adapt, but it costs something. It costs time, and it costs errors. Sometimes those errors are cheap, and sometimes they’re fatal. Sometimes the timeline is short, and sometimes it stretches out indefinitely while you work through something a more experienced person could have handed you in an afternoon.

Four prerequisites

Every new skill, job, or responsibility we take on comes with four prerequisites: knowledge, experience, a team, and relevant intuition.

Take being a parent. I’m blessed with four children, and I try to raise them well. To prepare for their births, I read up on best practices. As they grew up, I researched sleep training and behavior-modification literature. I had experience as the oldest of a large family, but nothing prepared me for the responsibility of raising a human all on my own. I was still better prepared than most new parents. I have a team, and my husband, our doctors, my family, and our community each support different aspects of raising my kids. And I can relate to my kids, because I have empathy and connection with them.

Missing any one of these, and raising a stable, healthy, productive, socially conscious human would be challenging at best and impossible at worst. My fourth child is getting a much better parent than my first ones did, although I think they turned out okay.

This is an example we can all relate to, whether as parents or children. It applies to any new skill, whether work-related, personal, or volunteer.

Now apply it to founders

So let’s take that analogy a bit further and apply it to organizational founders, nonprofit or for-profit.

We have so many founders who are genuinely excited about an idea or a mission and want to bring it to fruition. The excitement is real, and the mission is sound. Then the execution starts, and it gets hard in exactly the four places you’d predict.

They need knowledge of how to implement well, and even of which topics need learning in the first place. They need experience running an organization and managing workflows, processes, progress, and compliance. They need a team, so they have support and more hands to do the work. And they need intuition about what good leadership looks like and how to solve culture and process challenges.

How many founders do you know who have all four? I don’t know very many myself, and when I started, I certainly didn’t have it either. That makes the road to becoming a founder challenging, and often lonely.

The first prerequisite causes the most trouble, because you don’t know what you don’t know. A founder can assess their own gaps in experience, team, and intuition reasonably well, but knowledge gaps stay hidden. You can’t research a topic you’ve never heard of, and you won’t budget for a compliance requirement nobody told you about. Those blind spots stay invisible until they cost you something, and the bill is steeper than it had to be.

What to do when you’re missing pieces

If someone wants to be a founder but doesn’t have all four components, they can still succeed. They just have to source the missing pieces from somewhere else.

Seek out people with relevant experience. Find the ones who can tell you what you don’t know, since that’s the part you can’t reach on your own. Make sure your team and your support structure are strong, and lean on other people’s experience to make your own path successful. Yes, you can try learning the hard way. I’d just ask why you would, when someone else has already done it for you.

If you’re not sure what your blind spots are or what kind of partners you need, ask people who have succeeded. Ask what advice they’d give you and who they’d recommend as a mentor. People are happy to share their secrets to success, and that’s especially true in impact-focused areas where everyone benefits when a good organization makes it.

Some resources I can share for this include:

• The Personal MBA reading list
• The EA service providers directory, where everyone listed has a proven track record
• Talking to someone on my team, which is what we’re here for, to provide guidance and share our lens of experience
• GRIP, our four-session growth readiness program, if you’d rather work through your blind spots in a structured way. It’s half price through November at $475

Let’s take the path of least resistance and build successful organizations.