Why is a specific mindset required?
According to research done by Forbes 90% of the startups fail because of many reasons like inappropriate marketing strategies, lack of proper market research, etc. So is it easy to deal with the failure? The answer is no.
There are many startups in India like job vacancy results where 8,50,000 job vacancies are posted daily and they use ML techniques to bridge the gap between job recruiters and job seekers. So will it be easy for them to grow their startup into a big company? Absolutely not.
So basically it is as good as a student searching for jobs for freshers in this tough period of a pandemic caused by covid-19. So did you understand what I was telling you from these examples? The ability to deal with failures psychologically and physically is very challenging especially for startups that are running on bank loans or venture capitalists.
Have you seen that CEOs of big companies like yes bank and reliance are not able to handle the failures of their company? According to the latest update, the CEO of cafe coffee day committed suicide as he was not able to cope up with the bankruptcy faced by his startup. So to deal with failures in life you need to have that optimistic attitude of not giving up which is seen amongst athletes.
There are several reasons but I will not discuss them in detail. Most of the startups run on bank loans or investors when the investors go after 4 to 5 years and startups are not able to gain that much profit then they fail. Then many of them run on bank loans which are not sustainable in a longer period because of inefficient profit margin generated from the sales to run the company.
What is an athletic mindset?
Have you seen athletes coping up with failure? Most of the athletes use this principle “Willpower is like a muscle the more you use it the stronger it gets” The positivity that they generate from their athlete's life is what separates the best from the rest.
There are many athletes like Lance Armstrong who have survived stage four cancer because of the athletic mindset that he possessed. A normal person cannot sustain the dosage of chemotherapy when the cancer is in stage 4 but with his willpower, he managed to survive stage 4 cancer.
This is also called the champion’s mindset because of the never giving up attitude and hard-working attitude that athletes show by them.
Have you seen hard-working athletes like Michael Phelps do they always win gold medals in Olympics? Before the retirement of Michael Phelps, he lost gold to a youngster from Singapore.
How is this mindset beneficial for startups?
So I have told you about the athletic mindset so now let’s talk about its benefits.
As a startup, its business cycle is similar to a sine wave. You will have to face the troughs and crest. So an athletic mindset is necessary for the growth of startups to face such things in life and also in the startup environment.
So what if your startup gets converted into a billion-dollar company. So you would be happy right and if you are able to help people to search for jobs in India and most of the people will be happy after their achievement and their performance may further degrade because of the achievement.
So what is success according to you? When you achieve a goal that you have set in your life then you assume that you have become successful right. The answer is it is a point of failure. Because the hard work that you have done in your life will slow down because of the success achieved by you.
Have you seen people failing after achieving success in life? The most common example is some students who have scored great marks in 10th std fail to score good marks in 12th std as well as graduation. So what was the reason for failure? They thought that they had achieved success after scoring good marks in 10th std. They would have thought that studies are over and they would never study again but in reality, success is a slow process and a continuous process and normally not related to temporary goals.
So this type of mindset is hard to achieve and difficult to sustain normally this type of mindset is found in athletes who have worked hard by following a certain discipline in their life. This discipline will help them in their entrepreneurial journey as well.
As startups require great marketing skills and hard-working skills because initially, you have to do 80% of the necessary business activities because of a shortage of manpower and limited resources available to them while starting up their business.
As a startup founder one needs to maintain great health in order to survive in the fast-paced environment. The fitter you are the better you will be. So everything that I told you requires a great amount of discipline and the ability to maintain a great work-life balance which is found in the athletic mentality.