The Self-Reliant Entrepreneur

August 5The First Dozen Times

Let me suggest a theme for you: to state to yourself precisely and completely what that walk over the mountains amounted to for you,—returning to this essay again and again, until you are satisfied that all that was important in your experience is in it. Give this good reason to yourself for having gone over the mountains, for mankind is ever going over a mountain. Don't suppose that you can tell it precisely the first dozen times you try, but at 'em again, especially where, after a sufficient pause, you suspect that you are touching the heart or summit of the matter, reiterate your blows there, and account for the mountain to yourself. Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.

Henry David Thoreau—Familiar Letters (1857)

In your entrepreneurial journey there lives a progression toward “the heart or summit of the matter.” It may at times take the disguise of progress, contraction, or more likely a plateau, and it will involve repetition, endless repetition, to get it right.

Thoreau loved the mountains, and even in this letter to a friend he used their image to speak of the pains involved in his creative writing process.

With repetition comes muscle memory. Repetition allows us to better know ourselves, to better understand our value. With repetition comes simplicity. Repetition allows us to chisel away the parts that serve to weigh us or our ideas down.

Repetition—some might call it practice—allows us to ...