Most founders start a company because they have some vision of what success looks like that’s motivating enough for them to take the leap. 

Maybe it’s being on a magazine cover, or celebrated by everyone at a gala. Maybe it’s having a huge home on a private island, or being surrounded by girls in a club. Maybe it’s a sense of complete, calm control, of having full freedom over your future.

For me, probably because I’m a big skier and alpinist, it has always been this image of being on a summit. Wind in my hair, air in my lungs, exhilaration on my face. Pure victory. 

It’s probably good that founder life looks like a fantasy from the outside, because no one would do it if they knew, if they could feel, what it’s like in reality. 

For me, that reality feels like a wall.

I’m always facing a wall. It’s made of big, ancient, rough stones. There’s a mist in the forest leading up to it; the wall is so high you can’t see the top. If you had a bird’s eye view, it'd extend so long and far you could only see it fade into the horizon. The ground is cold and damp before it, and the wall sinks down into it - there's no way to dig under. 

The wall can be anything. Indeed, in the last five years, the wall has been everything for me: figuring out what customers want, building a high quality product, getting positioning right, cracking distribution. It’s been raising money, recruiting great people, keeping them happy. The wall has been dealing with myself and my own shortcomings. Indeed, it’s often many of these things at once.

And there’s only one way to get to the other side of the wall. And that’s through.

To do so, you only have your hands, your body, and mind, and some pretty primitive tools to figure it out.

And the thing about the wall is that it’s not just you that has to cross—you have to get your whole team through.

Most times, you can’t crack the wall own your own. You need your team’s tools —their design, coding, or growth skills, as well as their time, focus, and passion—to beat it.

This is real entrepreneurship. Getting through the wall. And then, after that wall, another wall, and another wall, and another wall.

Yes, on the other side of these walls there's a viewpoint, a summit. There is progress, and with it confidence and joy and the breeze of victory. But then you turn back around and there's an even bigger, sheerer wall to scale.

I’m writing this because in the last week or so, I’ve encountered a more intimidating wall than I’ve ever seen.

And for me, being up against a fresh new wall can be an emotional place.

I can feel helpless. I can feel bad for myself. I can lapse into temporary despair.

But then, I remember: I’ve been here before. I've made it through. And each time, I've relied on 3 core skills to make it.

In fact, 100% of successful founders I know do these three things consistently to scale their walls in their own startups and win.

In case it helps you, and as reminder to myself, here's the keys to getting through.

1/ Do the hard things. 

The thing about the wall is that it’s inherently inconvenient. Why is it there? Why do I have to deal with it? 

And most people don’t clear it because involves doing work they don’t want to do. Hard, distasteful, annoying work.

But to get to other side, you have to do things you don’t want to do. You have to do other things that other people won’t do.

Most startup tasks are like this. No one wants to talk to customers and be ignored, proven wrong, or rejected day after day. No one wants to focus on every single detail in your onboarding flow or outbound email copy. 

But focusing on, and then mastering, the hard things are what makes founders and their startups great. 

The things I have to do most days are the things I least want to do. I dislike QAing our product—but I must, to cross the product quality wall. It’s not fun to watch videos of customers churning in our product—but I must, to cross the product market fit wall. It’s boring to audit our budget line by line—but I must, to cross the sustainable growth wall.

Great founders lean in to hard things. They face the wall, put aside their emotions and current desires, and start hacking.

2/ Be consistent and persistent. 

As I mentioned, there is only one way to the other side of the wall—and that’s through. And there’s only one way through: to run into the wall, again, and again, and again.

Startup success requires you to find solutions to problems you’ve never seen before. You have to learn on the job, quickly. And the only way to do that is through repetition.

Try, fail, learn, repeat. Times one thousand reps. Until you find a crack. Then try one thousand times more to widen and smooth the wedge out until you can walk through.

The felt experience of this repetitive process is pain. It hurts to run full speed, slam into the wall, unearth a few stones—and then do it over again.

The pain can be a high grade, searing laceration: getting ignored, or rejected by customers; having someone quit; having an entire feature you worked on for months get thrown away.

Or it can be a low grade, dull pain: doing and redoing a core flow, or landing page, or demo script, until your eyes burn and face hurts and hands ache.

In the face of such pain, most people give up. 

But great founders don’t.

They keep going. They get up, dust themselves off, aim for the crack, and run again. 

Great founders also don’t close their eyes to the pain. After each attempt, they take stock of what happened—they look up, they learn, they feel.

And then they do it again, a little better each time, until they get through.  

3/ Believe that you’ll get what you want eventually

There's a famous anecdote about General James Stockdale, who was a prisoner of war in Vietnam for 7 years, popularized by Jim Collins, who asked after reading Stockdale's memoir: "If it feels depressing for me, how on earth did he survive when he was actually there and did not know the end of the story?"

When Collins posed that question to the admiral, Stockdale said: "I never lost faith in the end of the story. I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade."

Stockdale said that the prisoners who didn't make it out were both those who were really optimistic—"we'll make it out by Christmas"—but also those who were overly pessimistic: "They're never going to rescue us so let's just get used to this."

The survivors who actually made it were able to balance a realistic view of the day-to-day with an optimistic long-term belief that things would work out.

Great founders do this too.

It's easy to let the wall create a scarcity mindset inside you. It's easy to let it freak you out to the point where you begin to make decisions based on fear and anxiety. But running around in cold sweat always leads to bad decisions, low morale, and oftentimes, the very thing you're trying to prevent.

It's also possible to assume the wall is fixed, that you'll never get over it, such that you set up a little camp at the base with some tents and a nice fire and design your startup around its constraints. "We're never going to launch." "Fast growth is not for us." "High quality is not possible in our space." This is a far more comfortable stance, but just as lethal.

The best founders do neither of these things. They are clear on the stakes before them, but also are deeply confident things will work out, even if they're not sure how just yet.

This confidence obviously grows over time with the more walls they've successfully scaled.

But even from the first wall, the best founders have an innate self-assurance that they'll get to where they want to go: that magazine cover, that private island, that free afternoon.

This core belief—that you're going to win—is self-fulfilling. It leads to calmness, which enables clearer decision-making, more presence in the moment with your team, and more empathy towards others. It leads to balance, which allows for rest, self-care, and attention to life's other priorities.

And it leads to growth: if the wall is faced with the belief you’ll get there then it becomes a moment to reflect, remind yourself what matters, and see what you can learn.

Great founders act under the assumption that they're going to win. And that confidence is why they do.

Even if you don't have that self-belief right now—if you're a new founder facing your first wall, or a battle-scarred CEO looking up at the biggest one you've ever seen—there's only one thing you need to remember:

The only way out is through.

Unless you want to quit, you have no choice but to do the hard thing, and keep doing it, over and over. And if you don't quit, you will make it through, with a stronger sense of purpose and momentum that will make the next wall, and the wall after that, easier.

And who knows—you might just find your summit somewhere on the other side.