What I've Learned From My 10,000 Hours

My college thesis — both a written thesis and a visual photography thesis — centered on quinoa, which is an incredible plant. It's one of two vegetarian sources of complete protein, meaning it contains all of the amino acids. It’s protein-rich, and is loaded with magnesium, and so many other things the body needs. And yet it grows. 

Yet quinoa will only grow under incredibly specific circumstances, which many plants wouldn’t know how to navigate. For example, a quinoa plant will only bear the chino pod above 10,000 feet, so you need to plant it at a very high altitude and the best quinoa grows at 14,000 feet and up. It grows in a dirt that almost feels like sand, and the terrain that grows the best quinoa almost doesn’t ever rain. Yet good quinoa plants will grow six feet high, and in all manner of vibrant colors. The pod itself is both incredibly nutritious and now exceedingly popular…. And it comes from a really intense environment. 

That's how I feel about my love of entrepreneurship. It’s an intense and unforgiving and unrelenting field, but if you can find a way to survive in that environment, you can do almost anything else. If you can reach your 10,000 hours as an entrepreneur, you feel like you can handle any meeting or any boardroom or any question because you've had to handle so many different challenges.

Somewhere in my fourth year of The Hub, I hit the 10,000 hour mark, which is when you become an expert or a master in something. I almost felt it — there was a shift. Suddenly, I felt like I couldn't enter a meeting and feel scared or unprepared. I feel like I’ve seen it all. And even when things are new or challenging, I know I have the equipment to handle it. 

Entrepreneurship can become a lifestyle, and you can grow used to being on a pretty steep growth curve, and being constantly challenged and overwhelmed. Every time the challenge gets bigger, you're getting stronger. Over time, you can actually find comfort in that discomfort, in that changing, ever-growing landscape.

But you have to want to grow in that direction.

It helps that I honestly think of my company, The Hub, as a living thing. I started the company when I was 25 and, and over time, so much energy has been pumped into this system. I almost can't believe that this is my job and what I do every day, because the company itself has taught me all of these lessons — it’s hardened me and challenged me and brought a leader and entrepreneur out of me. I am a happier, more actualized version of myself, but I don't really think of it as like me doing that to myself. I think that the company is doing that to me. 

I think of it the same way with my employees, in that there are constantly opportunities for them to grow both in experience and as people. Our company is picking up steam and growing and evolving, and every new development is an opportunity for all of us to better ourselves and to have greatness pulled out of us, so long as we’re all willing to learn.

I’ve done my 10,000 hours, but there is still a lot left for me to learn. A lot of the truisms that we've all heard — enjoy the journey, it's not about the destination, et cetera — is advice that I still need to hear now. I catch myself going over the same thought patterns that I might have experienced two or three or four years ago. I’ll have instincts to raise a lot of money rather than grow things slowly and steadily, or I’ll feel the urge to hire a lot of people all at once. Right now, today, I feel impatient and frustrated. I want more and I want it now. But I have to remind myself of lessons I've already learned, which is to take things one day at a time and put in the work to prove you can handle bigger and bigger budgets and contracts. 

You have to keep retraining yourself to be patient. In the early years, I fell into a lot of common traps about vanity metrics. People would check in with me and ask how the company was going, and I would so desperately want to give them a big update about how you have so many employees or you just landed that distributor or you just raised so much money. Because of that, you can fall victim to wanting to hire those employees and raise that money and get into that store, so that people are impressed and you don't feel embarrassed answering that question. 

I am here to say, however, that there is power in humbly building underground and not worrying so much about what other people think. You need to delay your gratification. In the course of the day-to-day, you have to put in so much intensity and energy into your work, but entrepreneurship is a very long, patient arc. There's nothing punchy or zingy about it. It’s not about the big funding round or a valuation or a unicorn and a quick exit. It's a much longer, slower journey than that. 

When I first started The Hub, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking about whether I would get to a five-year or ten year mark, and I'm glad I didn't. If you told me on day one that it would be 10 years before my biggest client would reach the maturity of our contract, I don’t know if I would have been willing to walk down this path. I definitely didn’t think our success would take this long, but I also was only ever looking one week or one month ahead.

Now when people ask how business is going, I give a more measured answer than the vanity metrics. I tell them that I think we're making really sizable progress in some area, or that I feel like we're starting to make a difference. I use phrases that are about how we are becoming, and how the company is in process. I don't use finite terminology that implies that we accomplished something, because I want people to understand that the work we do is a journey unto itself, and it's not about the tentpoles along the way.

That is only something I could have learned by putting in my 10,000 hours of work, but there is still a lot more for me to learn. What’s more I’m excited to put in the work, and to see what kind of company we can build together. Here’s to the next 100,000.