Start Something That Matters

by Blake Mycoskie

  DON’T WORRY ABOUT WHAT OTHERS THINK

  “I’m sure some people at Goldman, when they found out about VeeV, sneered and said, ‘Courtney just can’t hack it.’ So what? My brother and I may not be making as much money as these people (if they’re still in the business). But we’re doing something we really care about and that we love. That’s worth it. Yes, it was rough at first, thinking about what people would say. Then it occurred to me: I am never going to see these people again.”

  DON’T FALL VICTIM TO THE BEST IDEA FREEZE

  “Many people starting something new are intimidated by the question ‘Is this the best idea I have?’ Of course a good idea is a great start, but the success of most ventures actually lies in the execution phase, not in the idea. I’d take a decent idea and superb execution over a great idea with sub-par execution any day of the week.”

  Now that TOMS is growing and is more financially secure, I don’t feel the same kind of fear I felt in the beginning. But writing this book has brought back some of the scarier memories, such as when TOMS didn’t have the money to pay our bills and we had to ask all of our vendors to extend us credit beyond what was normally accepted. I remember daily meetings with Justin, my numbers guy, trying to decide which vendor would be paid that week. (It usually ended up being the person who yelled the loudest when Justin was pleading with them for more time.) Our line of credit was almost always fully drawn, our credit cards were maxed out, and our bank was always asking about when we were going to pay off our debts. Then there was the pressure of having to sell and give away the shoes.

  What was most frightening, though, was that, given all the press we’d received and our bold declaration that we were changing the concept of business and philanthropy, we were being watched closely. A failure would have been very public.

  But I found some effective ways to live with the fear until I could overcome it. First, I remembered to live my story.

  I went back to my core question: Why am I doing this? When you go back to your core motivations, you affirm the authenticity of your project, which takes away one of the biggest fears: that you are a fraud. When you live your story, you don’t have to pretend you’re someone you’re not. You can just be yourself. It’s been said that there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who has nothing to lose—and it’s true in business too. When you are living your story, it means your actions and your mission are the same, which eliminates any room for shame or disappointment, the two emotions that underlie our greatest fears. That’s when you have nothing to lose.

  I also made sure to surround myself with interns. The wonderful thing about interns is that they are so enthusiastic and new to everything that they don’t waste time being fearful. They’re just excited to be working on something that feels important and meaningful. Having a group of enthusiastic people around you, all busy working toward the success of your enterprise, gives you confidence, makes you feel legitimate, and, ultimately, helps make whatever idea you are trying to create a reality. Thrive on interns, who can challenge your ideas and make you feel young and confident, no matter how old and scared you are.

  I surround myself with inspirational quotations. This easy-to-follow piece of advice has played a huge role in my being able to get past my own fears and insecurities throughout my entrepreneurial career. Say you’re starting a company, and you don’t have the money to hire a high-powered assistant or a board of directors or anyone at all who could give you advice, motivate you, or just be a sounding board for your ideas. You still have the ability to seek out amazing help.

  Original intern Jonathan and me learning how to make shoes at our first factory in Argentina.

  How? Quotes. Quotes from people who have seen their way through fear and failure and still risen. Surround yourself with these powerful words.

  When I started in business, I was often lonely, so I placed favorite quotes all over my apartment. They made me feel like I was never really alone. I would type up and print out my favorites on a piece of paper or cut them out of magazines and tape them to my wall. For the first six years of my entrepreneurial life, these quotes were all over my apartment, making it look as if a paper tornado had flown past.

  Here are a few of my favorite quotes about fear that have helped me through some of my darkest times:

  Change your thoughts and you change your world.

  —NORMAN VINCENT PEALE

  Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how

  close they were to success when they gave up.

  —THOMAS EDISON

  Success is the ability to go from one failure to another

  with no loss of enthusiasm.

  —WINSTON CHURCHILL

  You gain strength, courage and confidence by every experience in which you really stop to look fear in the face. You are able to say to yourself, ‘I lived through this horror. I can take the next thing that comes along.’ … You must do the thing you think you cannot do.

  —ELEANOR ROOSEVELT

  In addition to surrounding myself with short quotes, I read biographies. Because I left college to start a business and never received my degree, much of my education came from books that I found on my own, not the ones assigned to me by professors. My favorite books have always been biographies of successful entrepreneurs and other inspiring people.

  For example, when I started my cable-television business, I made a point to read the biography and autobiography of every figure in the business I could find, like that of Ted Turner, who founded CNN. When I started TOMS, I read about Richard Branson (founder of Virgin), Yvon Chouinard (founder of Patagonia), Mary Kay (founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics), Herb Kelleher (CEO of Southwest Airlines), Howard Schultz (CEO of Starbucks), and others whose businesses were devoted to both profit and a larger mission.

  When I advise you to read biographies, I don’t mean only in book form. There is plenty of biographical material on the Internet. Say you’re thinking about starting a nonprofit focused on protecting the environment or are about to change jobs at a late stage in your career. You’ll probably be able to find stories by or about people who have done (or who are doing) something similar to what you have in mind. Learning how someone else is already doing the thing you want to do, or a version of it, can eliminate fear—every path is easier to follow when you see someone else’s footprints already on it.

  I also remember to think small. It’s best not to regard your next step as a tremendous risk. Think about it as one small step on a long journey.

  Thinking big always sounds good, but it’s a common mistake shared by lots of people starting a business. We started TOMS with 250 pairs of shoes in three duffel bags—that’s it. I didn’t quit my job immediately. I didn’t invest tens of thousands of dollars. I just made 250 pairs of shoes and tried to sell them.

  By starting small, you can work through your story, try out your idea, and test your mettle. There’s a Japanese concept known as kaizen, which says that small improvements made every day will lead to massive improvement overall. This idea was made famous in the 1980s by Japanese car manufacturers, who very slowly but surely established a dominant position in the American automobile market by adding small improvements to their vehicles rather than introducing revolutionary innovation. When you keep this concept in mind, reaching big goals seems much less scary.

  Starting small is a particularly good idea for someone who already has a job. Let’s say you’re a math teacher but your real passion is baking. You don’t have to resign your position. Instead, rather than sitting on the beach for your next vacation, volunteer for a week at a bakery to see if you enjoy it. Learn what you can without making a full commitment. Ask the owner if you can take on part-time evening or weekend work in which you can learn the trade while still making money at your day job.

  If you discover that you are skilled at and passionate about your side project, you can then take the next step knowing much more than if you started blind, even as you still have much to learn. />
  I would also write down my fears and look at them. When fears stay stuck inside your head, your imagination can go wild, torturing you with all the various negative possibilities and outcomes. But when you write them down, you clarify exactly what you are afraid of, and soon the power they hold over you will fade.

  Whenever I feel fear coming on, I create a what-if scenario by drawing a line down the middle of a piece of yellow legal paper, using the left side to list my fears and the right to imagine the worst possible outcome.

  For example, when I began TOMS, I wrote on one side:

  “If no one buys the shoes, then the following will happen: I will lose $5,000 in material and start-up costs. Three months of my life will result in little.”

  On the other side, I wrote:

  “Even if worse comes to worst, I’ll be in Argentina for three months, learn a new skill, make new friends, and have great fun.”

  My final fear killer is to seek as much advice as I can—from everyone. You can often get great advice from all kinds of people if you just ask. Yes, some people probably won’t talk to you, no matter how intelligently you approach them. But you’d be surprised how many are more than happy to help.

  Using the Internet, you can reach almost anyone. And because the Web offers a low-commitment way to communicate, successful people are more likely than before to give advice. In the past, you had to cold-call, set up a meeting, arrange for transportation, deal with logistics, and so on. Now you can write an email and in minutes receive great advice.

  I’ve found that people like to give advice to those with whom they empathize or in whom they see a version of themselves. So many times I’ve seen young women reach out to successful female entrepreneurs and get terrific advice because the latter identify with a version of themselves in former times. Remember, once you become successful, life can become a little dry—the adventure and danger are reduced. So when a younger version of an entrepreneur comes along, his or her mentor gets to live vicariously through that person’s start-up phase—and play a role in the success of a new project.

  In 2002, after competing on The Amazing Race and experiencing firsthand the phenomenon of reality television’s amazing popularity, I decided to create a 24/7 reality-television cable channel. After doing a great deal of research, I contacted a man named Jack Crosby, a pioneer in the cable TV business. Like me, Jack was from Texas, and like me, he’d been in his mid-twenties when he started his first cable venture—and today he is in the cable television hall of fame. He soon became my mentor. Not only did he give me excellent advice, but he got a kick out of living vicariously through my battles, fondly remembering what he had gone through forty years earlier.

  One of the key fears that we all have is fear that this is the wrong time to start whatever our project is and we should wait until the “time is right.” Tim Ferriss, author of the bestselling The 4-Hour Workweek, has this to say about timing: “For all the most important things, the timing always sucks. Waiting for a good time to quit your job? The stars will never align and the traffic lights of life will never all be green at the same time. The universe doesn’t conspire against you, but it doesn’t go out of its way to line up all the pins either. Conditions are never perfect. ‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.… If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.”

  If you wait for the timing to be right before you make a move, you may never make a move at all. As a rule, you can pretty much count on time to create some of the scariest moments in your business career. It certainly happened to me.

  Another of my early mentors was an entrepreneur named Carl Westcott. Carl has started many companies, from 1-800-FLOWERS to Westcott Communications, which he sold for a ton of money; he was also an early investor in satellite radio and various online businesses.

  I originally met Carl by cold-calling him and his son, Court, when I was trying to raise money for the reality-TV cable channel. Carl agreed to talk because Court was interested in cable TV, and he himself had made a great deal of money with closed-circuit cable programming. It turned out he didn’t want to invest in my company (he saw too many risks—and he was right), but he liked me enough to start a business relationship anyway.

  The company he was working on at the time was called Digital Witness; it was a very successful start-up that helped restaurant managers monitor their employees. In 2006, Carl asked me to run his West Coast operation. This was a huge opportunity: It came with a large salary plus a small percentage of the company, and, even better, Carl was the person for whom I most wanted to work.

  Unfortunately, this offer arrived just before my trip to Argentina. The next time I saw Carl, back in America, he asked for my decision. I was terrified. I didn’t want to lose my relationship with him. And I didn’t want to lose the guaranteed financial security of a high-paying job in exchange for a risky start-up.

  But I felt so passionate about TOMS and knew I would never feel good about myself if I didn’t give it a shot. So I turned down Carl’s offer. But I did give his family the first pairs of TOMS prototype shoes ever made. Carl and Court, the serial entrepreneurs, are still holding on to them. When I asked them why, they said, “Simple—if you continue the way you’ve been going, one day these shoes could be worth a fortune on eBay.”

  Imagination is more important than knowledge.

  —ALBERT EINSTEIN

  When TOMS started, we had what could only be called very limited resources. Actually, it might be more accurate to say we had just about none.

  Because the concept of giving a product away to match a product sold was unique, we had no proven model to convince others to back us. The truth is, we didn’t even know if it would work; therefore, it was difficult for us to raise money the way someone starting a traditional business does. Instead, we kept explaining the idea over and over again to number-crunching wizards trained to make investment decisions based on the potential for profit, not philosophy.

  With no money, no likelihood of raising it, and no proven business model, we had to cut more corners than corners existed.

  As mentioned, one of the first things I did—and this was when TOMS’ entire workforce in America consisted of me—was to place an ad for interns on craigslist. The ad offered summer internships in design and marketing and referred people to the TOMS website, which was quite nice—nice enough to make it seem as if we were the real deal.

  POSTING ID: 143649614

  REPLY TO: tomsshoes@gmail.com

  SUBJECT: (marketing jobs) Hip Shoe Company seeks SUPER FANTASTIC Interns!

  If you are smart, creative, and entrepreneurial minded, this is a fantastic opportunity …

  TOMS is an up-and-coming shoe company based in Venice, California. Our product line is a fusion of Argentine fashion and California Surf Culture. For every shoe that we sell, we will give a FREE pair to a less fortunate person in Latin America or Africa.

  Our company is looking to fill several positions:

  1. SUPER FANTASTIC Business Intern—The person chosen for this position will work directly with the CEO of TOMS. No coffee making. You will have a huge hand in advertising, marketing, brand development, and distribution.

  2. WEB DESIGN Intern—Must be an experienced and AMAZING Design Student. Your work will directly affect the growth of our business. This is a great opportunity to build your resume.

  Although this is a non-paid internship, there is a very serious chance that this could lead to a lucrative full time job.

  For more information, please send resume to tomsshoes@gmail.com.

  Thanks!

  Blake Mycoskie

  Many people applied, excited at the prospect of learning so much at what must have sounded like a strange and interesting company. But when they showed up at the company headquarters—aka my apartment—for many, the excitement quickly evaporated.

  At the time, my Venice neighborhood was more welcoming to
drug dealers than to young summer interns. In fact, to let applicants into the apartment, I had to usher them past a somber-looking, barbed wire fence. Then I sat them down at the kitchen table where they might see the remains of that morning’s breakfast tacos next to a few pairs of shoes and a bunch of papers. Those who had pictured a more traditional internship—a big company filled with hip young professionals—didn’t pan out. But a few applicants recognized that this was a chance to get in on the ground floor of something that could really take off.

  TOMS’ first three interns started in May, and then we took on three more in July. One of them was my brother, Tyler—families are excellent places to raid for resources.

  Because we weren’t paying anyone yet, we made up for the lack of funds in fun. We would work hard and then play hard. Sometimes the two collided: Once, after a very late night at the apartment, Tyler fell asleep in my bedroom and slept in the next day. Meanwhile, I had to get up early for an appointment, and Jonathan was meeting with our UPS regional rep (UPS was one of our few vendors at the time). Because my apartment was our office, we held meetings in my bedroom, where we had placed two desks (the kitchen and living room were filled with boxes and shoes to be shipped out).

  About ten minutes after they started the meeting, a white-sheeted, ghostlike creature arose from my bed. The woman from UPS screamed.