Battle

I had previously started a series of posts on songs that are meaningful for entrepreneurs. I have also found meaningful passages in the last few pieces of fiction I’ve read, so I’ll widen the scope of that series of posts to ‘the arts’ in general—not just music.

The inspiration for this post comes from a novel I’m reading, Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry. I’m not even finished yet, but this epic Western is already one of my favorite books of all time.

The following scene—which finds one of the novel’s heroes after he single-handedly fended off a group of enemy attackers—contains an apt analogy for the entrepreneurship experience:

With no shooting to do for a little while, Augustus took stock of the situation and decided the worst part of it was that he had no one to talk to. He had been within a minute or two of death, which could not be said to be boring, exactly—but even desperate battle was lacking in something if there was no one to discuss it with. What had made battle interesting over the years was not his opponents but his colleagues. It was fascinating, at least to him, to see how the men he had fought with most often reacted to the stimulus of attack.

Admittedly, the analogy between entrepreneurship and ‘going into battle’ is somewhat cliché, but this passage digs a little deeper than the simple analogy. Entrepreneurship is so much easier when you have a business partner to talk to about the emotional rollercoaster that is entrepreneurship. I am grateful that my business partner, Lauryn, is right beside me on that rollercoaster. Though, I’m not sure which one of us would be Gus and which would be Call.