Business Monday: A Bias for Action – Bob Salvas

by Bob Salvas, contributing writer

You may have already heard of the recent accomplishments of Kelsey Pfendler.  Kelsey is a female solo rower who just made history by crossing the mid-Pacific Ocean in record time.  Not only was the 32-year-old the first American woman to accomplish the feat, but she was also the youngest person to ever do it AND she SMASHED both the women’s and men’s record for the event!  She rowed 2,400 miles from Monterey California to Honolulu Hawaii in 43 days, 17 hours, and 55 minutes.  An amazing achievement on so many levels.

What motivates a person to achieve such greatness?  And what business lessons can we learn from that?  Three come to mind….

1. Competition is good. Kelsey said she loves competitive sports and chasing records.  She believes that those things push you to be better than you would otherwise be.  The same applies to business.  Businesses often complain about their competition but instead, the competition should light a fire that makes you work harder and innovate more!
2. You must get out of your comfort zone. Kelsey views endurance sports as a metaphor for life.  By embracing stress and pushing through discomfort, future challenges become easier.  There is almost no place where your comfort zone challenges you more than in business.  We frequently go into business because we love what we do but then we realize there are all these OTHER factors that determine whether we succeed or not and MANY of them may be outside our comfort zone.  Often, this involves learning something new and that, especially for adults long out of school, can be daunting but it also can be a BIG key to business success.
3. You need to have a bias for action. No athlete will ever tell you that planning and preparation are unnecessary.  In fact, Kelsey prepared and trained for her record-breaking crossing for two whole years before taking it on.  But there is such a thing as over-planning.  In my time as a SCORE counselor, I met MANY would-be businesspeople who just kept planning and never acted on their plan/idea.  Fear is a powerful motivator for delaying until everything is ‘perfect’ but everything will NEVER be perfect so at some point you just got to GO!  A ‘bias for action’ is realizing you won’t know everything you need until you act.  To paraphrase Dr Martin Luther King Jr, you do NOT have to see the whole staircase to take the first step!

So, embrace that competitive fire, get out of your comfort zone, and plan, but at some point, you must also ACT!  In Kelsey’s own words:

“Think about trying to find your own big, hard, scary thing. You might not think that you are strong enough to finish it right now, but you’re definitely strong enough to start it, and you’ll find everything else along the way.”     – Kelsey Pfendler

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Photo, top: Kelsey Pfendler. Photo from Your Oar Kelsey. You can support Kelsey’s efforts and read more about her, here: https://yourowkelsey.com/support/

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Bob Salvas is a Professional Development Manager for the RI Builders Assn, a marketing consultant, the founder of Momentum Networking, and the co-founder of THE MARKETING CAMP, a yearly conference to help small businesses achieve success.  For more information about THE MARKETING CAMP, go to themarketingcamp.com.  Bob can be reached at 401-359-1602 or at [email protected].