Many years ago, it must have been around 2007, I was at a low point professionally. I had been doing entrepreneurship for two or three years. And I was already feeling on my own skin how brutal it can be. I worked a lot. Too much. I started at 8am, when I woke up, took a break of two or three hours around 6 or 7 in the evening to see my friends, then at 11pm, when everything went quiet, I started working again until two or three in the morning.
The results? Close to zero.
Sure, I had occasional moments of euphoria, but most of the time I felt like I was eating glass and staring into the abyss. It was brutal. Humbling. That difficult period was the only time in my life when I considered the option of taking a job somewhere.
“We recognise each other”
I wrote a message to Radu Ionescu, formerly of Kinecto, now an angel investor. We barely knew each other. Radu had been a speaker at an event run by a student organisation at the Academy of Economic Studies. I, as a marketing student, had been in the audience.
“Radu, I do not know if you still remember me, I saw you have an open position at Kinecto, the marketing agency. I would like to come in for an interview.”
I put the phone down and my hand was shaking.
It felt like failure. I went to the interview the next day, Radu asked me two or three basic things, listened carefully and said:
“Andrei, I like you, I think you can do very cool things. But you are not an employee. You are an entrepreneur.”
Part of me was shouting “yes, I am”. The other part was whispering “Radu, I need the job”.
I tried to convince him that maybe I was not quite as much of an entrepreneur as I seemed to him. And that I know some marketing and that I would really like to work there.
He repeated it, calmly, smiling: Andrei, come on, you are an entrepreneur. We recognise each other.
We recognise each other. A phrase I have since said to dozens of coaching clients, when, for reasons I have never fully understood, it was suddenly obvious to me that we were similar.
I left there sad that I had not got the job. But also wondering how on earth he had worked out that I could be a good entrepreneur, because from where I was standing it did not look like it. Not at all.
It was one of the important meetings of my life. I went back home, went back to work, and started staring again into the abyss called entrepreneurship.
Thank you
Years later, having become an agency owner myself, I was invited to speak on an advertising industry panel, and in the front row of the audience was Radu, who was also going to speak.
I thanked him publicly, including for the fact that he inspired me to start a blog and write. He answered, smiling, that he would like to have the same power of persuasion over more people, and on other subjects.
I remembered this story the other day, when someone wrote to me after my previous newsletter. I will not give their name, because I did not ask permission to share their feedback here, and I hope they will not mind:
On the subject of “social context beats willpower”, many years ago I managed to avoid the trap of an environment that was toxic for me. Your article from 2011 called When in doubt, jump was the spark that helped me and got me moving to make a major change in my life. Thank you. It is a therapeutic thank you, one I feel the need to say out loud after all these years, directly and personally. G.
I do not know G personally, and I had to go and look up the article I wrote in 2011, because I did not remember a thing about it.
But that message was enough to make me close the laptop, get up from my desk and go for a walk. It gave me a lot of satisfaction and that feeling of “right, today I did not work for nothing”. So thank you, G.
But do you know the full truth?
That the thank you which mattered so much did not come from the work I did on the day I received the message. It came in 2026, from an article written in 2011.
And if in 2011 I had written an article hoping it would have an impact on someone, or hoping to get something back, I would have considered that I had failed.
It took fifteen years for something done in 2011 to return anything to me, any kind of feedback at all. That article had a big impact on G’s life. For fifteen years, for me, it was just an article I believed in, wrote and sent out into the ether.
Then I started writing another one, with no feedback of any kind, no applause, no thank yous, no reply and no like. The way I often do with these newsletters too.
And that is so representative of entrepreneurship
You need to reach the point of doing what you do because you like the process. Not because you are hoping for a result. I wrote because I liked writing. And that is what kept me going.
The thank yous are a great bonus, I am grateful for them and they often make my days better.
But I do not count on them for a second. And I have no expectation that they will come. Because I know that sometimes they can arrive fifteen years later.
And I want to enjoy my work now. Not “maybe in fifteen years”.
Focus on the process, not on the result.
If the process is not enough to make the effort feel worth it, you most likely need to change the process.
About the author
For over thirteen years I have worked with entrepreneurs, leaders and professionals who perform, who get above average results, but who have become so used to constant tension that it has become their normal. I help them take back control, put their thinking in order and find their balance. Without having to sacrifice the results that matter so much to them.
If you want to explore what working together would look like, start here: Coaching for overthinking executives. Or read more about my background and method.