In this episode Rob talks about “playing long ball”, thinking about as a founder or significant other of a founder, how to stay in this space for the long haul.  He highlights three points to achieve this and goes into details on each.

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Episode Transcript

Rob Walling:

So I needed an opener for the show, and I Googled “podcasting jokes,” and I guess the big joke is that most podcasts don’t have big audiences, or don’t have audiences at all. A bunch of the jokes are things like “What did the podcaster say to their audience? Is anybody out there?” And “what do you call a podcaster with an audience of one? Successful.” So while these jokes are not funny, it did make me thankful for you, our listeners. We have thousands of listeners every week, and we really appreciate you hanging around with us and sticking with us through these journeys.

 

We know that some of our shows are Sherry and I getting on the mic and talking about things we’re going through; other times it’s really instructional, educational, and then other times we’re interviewing successful people to find out what makes them tick and how they’ve done it in a sustainable fashion. This week, Sherry is on the road, and she’s actually dealing with multiple health issues in her family as well as doing a lot of one-on-ones at a conference on the West Coast, and so I’m flying solo, and I think it’s going to be awesome.

Rob Walling:

So this week, it’s just me, as I said in the intro. I’m going to be talking about playing longball, thinking about, as a founder or significant other of a founder, how to be in this game for the long term. I’ve picked three points that I want to talk about: the first one is valuing relationships over success. The reason that I find this so important is that I see founders who basically value their own success over the relationships around them, and they’re willing to either burn relationships or just burn people in general over this.

 

What I’ve learned over my 20 years, almost 20 years as an entrepreneur, is that you don’t become successful without relationships. It is such a monumental task to climb up this tower and reach the top and have some success as an entrepreneur, and at a certain point in my career, I thought that you could do it alone. I thought that I could accomplish this without anybody’s help, and the further that I’ve gone along, the more I’ve realized, there’s an old African proverb, it says “If you want to go fast, go alone; if you want to go far, go together.”

 

That’s how I think about this, is like, playing longball in entrepreneurship and not just coming in and trying to do something for one or two years because you want to make some money or you want to create your job. That’s not a sustainable approach to this. If you want to do it, value your relationships. And what I mean by that, there’s a number of things. I’m going to talk four of five different things that you can do to make sure that you’re valuing the people around you and you’re building relationships in a way where you’re not using people and where you’re not screwing them over.

 

So one thing is not to steal other people’s ideas. This is widespread, it’s insane how many times I’ve said something or written something or done something in a talk, and I will literally hear someone say it a couple weeks later in their own blog and act as if they came up with this,