Successful Entrepreneurs Know the Difference Between Stress and Pressure
April 25, 2017
As an entrepreneur, you’ll do well to distinguish between stress and pressure. You can handle pressure, but being stressed out leads to burning out.
“I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.” – Michael Jordan
The Big Game
Think of great athletes in big moments. Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods, Tom Brady. They are clutch – under pressure.
In the final seconds of a big game, we don’t talk about the player being able to handle the stress or avoid being stressed out.
We talk about them being able to handle the pressure. Great under pressure.
It’s said that to win The Masters golf tournament, the key is not really skilled play. It’s being able to handle the pressure of the moment.
Masters champions don’t get stressed-out. We know what stressed-out is in golf. It’s when your driver ends up wrapped around a tree or your putter ends up in the middle of a pond. You lose it.
What’s The Distinction Between Stress and Pressure?
Often we don’t distinguish between stress and pressure. We use “she’s stressed-out” or “she’s under a lot of pressure” in much the same way. But as an entrepreneur, you need to know the difference.
Pressure is something external. You don’t have pressure, you feel it from a situation. It’s the pressure of the big game, not the stress of the big game.
Stress, on the other hand, is felt internally. A bent piece of metal that’s about to break has stress damage. It was caused by outside pressure, but the internal state is defined as stress.
So how does Michael Jordan make that last second shot? How does Tom Brady engineer that comeback? They feel the pressure of the situation – tremendous pressure.
But they don’t give into stress.
That is the difference maker.
Be Explicit About Assumption and Prepared for Errors
“Failure should be our teacher, not our undertaker. Failure is delay, not defeat. It is a temporary detour, not a dead end. Failure is something we can avoid only by saying nothing, doing nothing, and being nothing.” – Denis Waitley
As an entrepreneur, be mindful of anxiety.
Anxiety and stress are closely related. Anxiety is: a feeling of worry, nervousness, or unease, typically about an imminent event or something with an uncertain outcome.
Anxiety is an internal worry – a feeling of stress – that comes about because you fear uncertainty in the future.
This brings us to an important point regarding a start-up’s approach to marketing.
In marketing, we talk about making explicit assumptions. This means you make assumptions about what might work best – with no doubt or confusion about the reality that you’re working off assumptions.
In other words, you plan for the unknown. You acknowledge from the beginning that you’ll make errors, that some efforts will fail.
In this acknowledgment comes the power to control pressure and avoid stress. When you acknowledge from the beginning that you’ll make errors – and better yet realize that those errors are the basis for improvement – you take away the uncertainty that causes anxiety.
You understand the pressure you’re under, and you don’t let it stress you out.
To be great under pressure, you can’t be afraid to fail. Because that fear creates the anxiety that leads to the failure you fear.
To be a successful entrepreneur, you must break that cycle.
“I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work.” – Thomas A. Edison
Practical Risk and Sticking to the Game Plan
“Success is stumbling from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
In Super Bowl 51, the New England Patriots fell desperately behind in the first half. They found themselves facing the biggest deficit to overcome in the game’s history.
You might expect them to act on desperation. To break from their game plan and start going for huge plays.
But Coach Bill Belichick, Tom Brady and company didn’t panic. They stayed with their game plan and mounted a steady comeback for the win.
In the 2017 Masters, Sergio Garcia stumbled early on the final back nine and watched what was a two-stroke lead turn into a two-stroke deficit. But he didn’t panic, didn’t start taking wild risks. He continued to play with same pace and demeanor. By the end, he’d even things up and went on to win the first playoff hole.
When we watch these games, we feel anxiety for the players. We marvel at how they stay calm and just continue to go about their business – when we are freaking out just watching them!
Their calm under pressure is the sign of a professional. That professional calm leads to another important business trait: sticking to the plan and taking practical risks.
“Take calculated risks. That is quite different from being rash.” — General George Patton
Successful entrepreneurship is not achieved with the Hail Mary pass. You can’t perform consistently under pressure if that pressure is crushing you.
You can avoid stress in business by taking practical risks. Again, you work off explicit assumptions, prepared for the unknown. But that doesn’t mean throwing yourself into the abyss. It means having a plan so you can take risks, learn from failures, and adjust your efforts so you still achieve your final goal.
“Test fast, fail fast, adjust fast.” — Tom Peters
To Fail, To Win
You’ll fail in business. You’ll fail in sports. You can only win if you’re willing to risk losing.
Competition and drive to win put you under pressure. But this pressure is a good thing. It’s what drives us to succeed.
In our working lives, stress isn’t typically the direct result of missing a meeting or losing a sale. We stress out when we create a narrative of failure in advance. Even when the worst happens we realize it’s not as bad as we thought it would be. We pick ourselves up and keep moving.
Don’t let pressure become stress. Don’t internalize fear into anxiety. It puts you into a cycle where you fail because you fear failure.
“No human ever became interesting by not failing. The more you fail and recover and improve, the better you are as a person. Ever meet someone who’s always had everything work out for them with zero struggle? They usually have the depth of a puddle. Or they don’t exist.” – Chris Hardwick
Entrepreneurship is a struggle. A challenge. You must take risks, you must work under pressure.
It’s damn hard.
Which is why is such a great thing to do with your life.
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