Burn the Boats: A Professor-Founder’s Commitment and the Temptation of a Way Back

Do not leave yourself a way back when starting a business—burn the boats. Burn the Boats Master60, No. 921 A strategy for winning without letting a fallback undermine your future. Burning the boats means going all in to pursue your dreams. We all need to give ourselves a chance to discover the limits of our abilities, find the boundaries we may never reach, understand ourselves, and appreciate our power to make dreams real. The author offers nine suggestions: 1. Trust your intuition. Finding your future usually begins with listening to yourself. Trusting your intuition is like exercising a muscle: the more you practice, the stronger it becomes. 2. Overcome your inner demons and enemies. The motives and reasons of people trying to undermine you do not matter. What matters is how you handle and respond to their doubts and criticism. 3. Take the leap. Remind yourself that doing nothing is the greater risk. Replace every ‘What if...?’ with ‘What comes next?’ and make it work. 4. Transform your anxiety and use it as fuel. In fact, peak performance requires a moderate level of anxiety. Fear and anxiety can—and should—propel you to do better in the future. 5. Embrace every crisis you encounter. View each crisis positively. The bigger the crisis, the more new opportunities it brings. Never let a major crisis go to waste. 6. Break the unhelpful patterns you have created. Above all, recognize your weaknesses and be willing to grow and improve. Identify unhelpful patterns and overcome them. 7. Consolidate your gains. Every major achievement lays the foundation for your next milestone. Fully embrace a mindset of continued growth and seek new challenges and goals. 8. Appreciate excellence in others. If you learn to recognize other people’s talents and do everything you can to help them realize their potential, you will achieve more in life and work. 9. Pursue your boldest dreams. The pressure to succeed or perish forces you to work hard, be creative, and dig deeper. It forces you to forge your own path. Whatever your dream, however distant, absurd, or impossible it may seem, make it happen. ---- The biggest issues for university professors starting businesses are ‘commitment’ and ‘a way back.’ Professors often argue that staying at the university lets them fully use its resources, recruit excellent students, and use the professor title to make business contacts. But entrepreneurship requires greater determination to move forward. There are many distractions and moments of hesitation. Cutting off every route of retreat and moving forward without looking back may actually improve the chance of success. The Battle of Julu was the most critical battle at the end of the Qin dynasty. Xiang Yu led 50,000 Chu troops against the main Qin force of 400,000 commanded by Zhang Han and Wang Li at Julu. He personally led his entire army across the Zhang River, then ordered all cooking pots smashed and all boats sunk. Each soldier carried only three days’ dry rations; the rest were burned to show their determination to fight to the death. Inspired by Xiang Yu leading from the front, the Chu army fought fiercely with high morale, winning all nine engagements. Every Chu soldier fought like ten men. Xiang Yu again threw himself into the fighting to inspire his troops, ultimately inflicting a crushing defeat on the Qin army.