Are you a founder, entrepreneur or have a startup company? So don’t be a duck!

Today I really wanted to present a book about the company’s vision and purpose. The review is almost finished, but then last night when I was out for a walk I saw a duck swimming in the water. She immediately had to think about the founders.

Founder: The duck in the water

What did you see exactly? A duck swam in the water. In fact, she was swimming upstream. Because the water was moving so fast at that point, the duck not only had to pad its paw quickly to maintain its position, but more importantly, it had to pad quickly and hard to move through the water.

Now that might not sound particularly amazing. But because the duck was struggling, I couldn’t keep walking. So I noticed the following: The duck was struggling to move in the stream. But I couldn’t see a destination.

She swam to the right, swam to the left and let herself drift for a few seconds, perhaps to gain strength. She ended up going to the beach after kayaking by about ten feet. I had a feeling she absolutely had to work hard to move forward.

Speed, goals and absurdity

I also felt that she was not heading for an obvious destination, but that she was wandering along the road, using a great deal of strength, before I finally went ashore. But that was not all. Because I had to immediately think that the duck was ultimately behaving in such a pointless way, if you can say that about an animal.

Because she only wanted to climb three meters ashore and if the current was too strong for her, she could fly to that point. And why this swim left and right and drift backwards?

Lots of paddling means lots of activity

I could put it another way: the duck was very active, which I noticed was costing a lot of strength. However, the development of activity not only showed a clear trend, but the duck could have reached its goal more easily in the end if it used its strength more sensibly. And here we are with the founders.

So much to do with the founders

The founders have a lot to do. This is not only due to the fact that setting up a company is generally relatively expensive. But there is also a lot to do in the details – eg product development, customer acquisition, marketing, discussions with all kinds of people, etc.

All this is often left to the founders, whether it is due to limited financial resources, lack of employees, or other reasons. This means that the founders are developing and they also have to develop many activities. They often tell me that, too. And it is somewhat important to be particularly active.

After all, it is in the nature of things to be very active when setting up a business. This must be the case. Because if you weren’t, what kind of founder would you be? This is the reason for your activity. Very active even. like a duck. Then the “rowing” is done, and it’s done. Then I sometimes ask myself: Why?

Activity for the sake of action?

Because just like with the duck, I sometimes feel the founders, but not just there, develop a business in order to develop the business. In other words, you don’t have to be that active, so you don’t have to “paddle” that hard.

But you do it anyway. Because “that’s how you should be as a founder.” As a result, the founders are not making any progress and neither is the company or startup. This means that just as with the duck, there is a lot of paddling, but the result cannot be measured apart from strength development.

Activity does not advance the goal

In addition, I can repeatedly note that not only the activity is great and the benefit or the result is not present, but also that the activities do not show any direction that leads to or leads to the desired result.

This means that the activities are moving in a direction that has nothing to do with the desired result. This was also the case with the duck I noticed. This struggled and swam and rowed instead of getting out of the water and flying just a few meters to reach the goal.

Founder: What you can learn from the duck

Developing activities in and of itself is not a bad thing at all. But the development of activity for the sake of activity is absolutely useless. Because it is only in this way that energy and resources that can be used more profitably elsewhere are consumed at another time.

But then that energy and resources may not be available because they have already been exhausted. Even if the activity is aimed at achieving or promoting a particular goal, it is reasonable to continue to wonder whether the activity just undertaken is the best option or whether there is a better option.

Because perhaps the desired result can be achieved with less effort, less time and less effort in general. There is the traditional sentence of the Roman philosopher Seneca:

For a ship that does not know its port, there is no favorable wind. I would add: “And even if you know the port, think about whether and why you want to go there.” Or in other words: “Don’t be a duck!”.

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