My 7-Year-Old Son Throws A Tantrum Over the Same Thing that Upsets Entrepreneurs. Let's Stop This! Every few months, it's the same throwdown.
By Jason Feifer Edited by Frances Dodds
This story appears in the March 2023 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »
Every few months, my wife and I have the same battle with our son. There are tears. There's despair.
But recently, in the midst of one such skirmish, something occurred to me: Entrepreneurs often have this same battle…only, we have it with ourselves! And yet, it's entirely avoidable — or, at the very least, it's possible to move past it without tears — because there's a solution at hand. My son won't listen to me about this, but I hope you will.
Here's how it goes down with my son.
His name is Fenn, he is 7 years old, and like all kids his age, he goes through shoes quickly. His shoes either become too small or too stinky, and it's time for them to go. That's when the problem starts.
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Fenn likes his old shoes because they're comfortable and familiar, and he really, really, really does not want new shoes. He hates new shoes. We buy them for him anyway, because what else can we do? Then he refuses to wear them. When we finally coax them onto his feet, he flails around. There are tears. He takes them off and flings them away. This goes on and on. He's been doing this for as long as I can remember.
"They're not comfortable," he always says. "I want my old shoes."
And every time, I tell him the same thing.
"Fenn," I say, "I know you want your old shoes, but your old shoes used to be your new shoes. You once hated those shoes because they were new and uncomfortable. But then you started wearing them, and they became comfortable, and then they became your old shoes. And that's exactly what will happen with these new shoes, because once you start wearing them, they will become your old shoes."
This line of reasoning never works. I get it. It's too abstract for a 7-year-old.
But I hope you see how this is relevant to you.
As entrepreneurs, we experience never-ending cycles of change. Our customers' needs change. Our technology changes. We face new competitors or unexpected challenges. Today we're navigating new ways of working, labor shortages, and economic uncertainties, and tomorrow we'll be facing — well, nobody knows!
With each change, we have the same gut instinct. We think: Ugh, things were better before.
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Why were things better before? Because we were familiar with that stuff! We felt a mastery over it. We knew what we were doing. We understood what people wanted. And now we don't. Which means we must reinvent. Relearn. Rethink.
Do you see where this is going?
Every time we go through this cycle, we focus on the loss of our current comfort — but we forget that whatever comfort is "current" was once new and uncomfortable!
We are not the products of time-honored traditions. We are the products of change. We built our careers and lives on top of changeable things. We mastered new technologies. We identified new opportunities. We moved faster than others, innovated smarter than others, and stepped fearlessly through the changes that terrified others. Then these new things became comfortable and familiar, and we forgot they were ever new in the first place.
We don't come from the past. We come from the future — which is to say, everything we do was once new and terrifying to the people who came before us.
So how do we move forward now? We start by recognizing that. And we can reflect: What did we do back then to seize opportunities that others missed? Did we run experiments? Find smart partnerships? Get to know our customers better than anyone else? We can do these things again. And this time, we can do them even better.
My son doesn't get it yet. But in a way, he does: After a few days, he's always happy in his new shoes.
