The Most Important Startup Skill Nobody Talks About

A student caught me just as class ended. “Hey,” he said, hesitating near my desk. “Can I talk to you for a second?”

I looked up from my laptop. He was one of those students… the kind other students low-key hate. Always early. Always prepared. Always ready with a good question. A student who reminds you why you love teaching. So when I saw the worry on his face, I braced myself.

“I just… I wanted to apologize,” he stammered. “I’ve missed a few assignments, and that’s not like me. I’m really sorry. I’ve been going through some personal stuff this semester — family stuff… health stuff… relationship stuff… I just haven’t been myself.”

I held up my hand to stop him.

“I don’t care,” I said.

He blinked. “You… don’t care?”

“Not about your missing assignments,” I clarified, realizing how I must have sounded. “I care about you. But you don’t need to apologize to me about a couple pieces of homework.”

He didn’t quite know what to do with that.

Most students, especially at places like Duke, are used to teachers demanding accountability, enforcing strict rules, holding them to high standards (and punishing them when they fall short). I wasn’t about to give him a pass. But I wasn’t going to scold him either. Instead, I know how to recognize an important teaching moment when I see one, and this was definitely an important teaching moment.

He wasn’t failing. He was experiencing a milestone, and I needed him to understand what it meant.

Success on the Good Days Is Easy

I’ve had some bad breaks over the years — particularly when it comes to health. And it’s taught me a difficult lesson:

Eventually, life will punch you in the face.

It’s not a question of if. It’s when.

You’ll get sick. Someone you love will get sick. You’ll lose someone. You’ll lose something. The job you thought was a sure thing will vanish. The relationship you thought was solid will fall apart. The car will crash. The diagnosis will come. The world will knock you down.

And in that moment, you’ll be forced to decide: now what?

That’s the real test of success.

Not how well you perform when things are going great. Not how much you accomplish when you’ve got free time, full energy, a clean bill of health, and a supportive circle of friends and family.

Anyone can succeed on a good day. That’s not impressive. That’s expected.

The real question is: Can you keep going when everything isn’t going your way?

Because that’s when it counts.

What Founders Get Wrong About the Journey

This lesson isn’t just about students and missed assignments. It’s about founders, too. In fact, it’s especially about founders.

I work with lots of early-stage entrepreneurs who think they’re ready for the grind. They’ve read the books. They’ve watched the YouTube videos. They know it’s going to be hard.

What they don’t realize is just how long it’s going to be hard — and how many things outside of their business are going to get hard, too.

Building a startup isn’t just a full-time job. It’s a full-life job. You don’t get to pause it when your dad ends up in the hospital. You don’t get to take time off when your relationship falls apart or your anxiety spirals or the economy tanks.

The startup doesn’t care that your life is imploding. The work is still there.

And so are the investors who need updates.

And the users who need support.

And the servers that need fixing.

And the team that needs leading.

Startups take time — years, not months. And in that time, life will absolutely throw something at you that you didn’t plan for. If you think you’ll be able to work “once things settle down,” you’ll never get anything done.

Instead, you have to build through the chaos. You have to show up anyway. You have to figure out how to succeed even when your world feels like it’s crumbling.

That’s the skill. That’s the muscle. That’s what separates the founders who want to be successful from the ones who are successful.

Not talent. Not luck. Not even timing.

Resilience. Persistence. Relentlessness.

Learning to Show Up Anyway

The student who came to me after class had done everything right — until life happened.

He’d built his success on good health, a supportive family, a structured system, and plenty of time. And, to his credit, he’d done really well in that environment.

But, at least for a few weeks during this one semester, the structure cracked. And, like most people facing real adversity for the first time, he blamed himself for not keeping everything together.

What he didn’t realize — and what I tried to help him see — was that the moment wasn’t evidence of his failure.

It was his first real opportunity to become great.

For the first time, he was learning the most important success skill of all: how to keep going when things aren’t going your way.

That doesn’t mean pretending everything’s fine. It doesn’t mean grinding yourself into the ground. And it definitely doesn’t mean pretending the chaos doesn’t affect you.

It means figuring out what matters most… and showing up for it even when it’s hard.

It means learning to give yourself grace when you fall behind… but also learning how to pick yourself back up.

And it means understanding that the story of your life — and the story of your company — will be shaped far more by what you do after the bad day than by anything that happened before it.

The Most Reliable Predictor of Success

By the time I finished explaining this to the student, I could see the tension leave his shoulders.

No, he didn’t need to apologize for missing a few assignments. He needed to figure out how he was going to finish strong.

And, to be clear, this wasn’t about the importance of doing your school work. Nobody needs to care about their school work when their life is falling apart.

But life goes on, and he was going to need to care about his school work again. (Or, if not his school work, something equally practical.)

The point is, he’d proven he could be successful doing his work during the good times. But now he had an opportunity to learn how to be a great student during the hard times. And if he could figure that out, he’d leave school with a far more valuable skill than anything I could teach him in a lecture. Because, ultimately, the most reliable predictor of long-term success — in school, in startups, in life — isn’t how well you perform when everything goes right. It’s how well you show up when everything goes wrong.