I once sat across someone who’d spent a lifetime between academia and industry, and the clearest thing they said was simple, slightly brutal, and true, you need a conviction, no amount of data can sway it. That line stuck with me because it captures the tension every founder faces, the itch that won’t stop until you act, and the nagging voice that asks, what if I’m wrong.
Vision without feedback is delusion. Feedback without vision is chaos. The sweet spot is somewhere messy in the middle, where stubbornness meets curiosity. Here’s how I’ve come to think about balancing those forces, and how to teach, or learn, this properly.
I’ve seen it again and again. The founders who last have a consistent worldview, they can tell a story about the future, and they can explain why the world needs what they’re building. That story is more than marketing fluff, it’s a compass. When everything spins out of control, the compass helps you choose a direction, even if you don’t know the exact route.
Yes, being that committed sometimes looks like tunnel vision, and sure, people will call you stubborn. Fine. I’d rather be stubborn with a map than unfocused without one. As someone put it during a conversation I had, if someone says your conviction is unshakeable, that’s not necessarily a flaw. It’s part of getting anything done.
But here’s the catch, the map needs updating. Vision should be durable, not petrified. Durable enough to guide decisions, flexible enough to incorporate facts that matter.
Getting feedback feels virtuous, so most founders hoard it like it’s the secret sauce. Then they collapse under the weight of every idea, every critique, every well-meaning comment. That’s not helpful. What is helpful is learning to filter feedback quickly, politely, and effectively.
Ask one probing follow-up question before you dismiss criticism. Nine times out of ten, the reaction you get will tell you whether the criticism is a hint, a true problem, or someone’s bad day. Most people aren’t trying to ruin your life, they just don’t know the whole context. If something sounds useful, drill down, but if it’s noise, let it go.
A practical mental model, stolen and adapted from far too many awkward conversations, is this: – If feedback reveals a misunderstanding of your context, correct it, then move on. – If feedback points to a structural risk you hadn’t seen, prioritize it. – If feedback is opinion without evidence, file it under maybe.
A friend put it bluntly, and I loved the phrasing, you should “give benefit of the doubt” until you see a pattern that proves otherwise. That keeps you open, without being a doormat.
There are two camps: the meticulous plan makers, and the build-and-learn people. Both have merits, and both can be disastrously dogmatic. A business plan has value as a communication artifact, especially when you need to talk to banks or partners. The lean approach has value because you get market signal faster.
So my take is pragmatic, unattractive to zealots on both sides, and perfectly useful. Start with a light, realistic plan. Don’t write a novel that nobody will read. Then, treat it as living, not law. As someone I talked to said and I like repeating, no business plan survives first customer interaction. That shouldn’t scare you, it should free you.
If you need money from a bank or an investor, prepared financials and a clear plan help. But the better question is, does your plan rest on mechanisms that make sense? If a plan’s numbers are pretty but the underlying logic is hollow, it doesn’t matter how polished the spreadsheet looks. If you can explain the mechanism of your business, and it maps to the world as you see it, you’ve done something useful.
Most entrepreneurship classes focus on checklists, stages, and templates. Useful, but incomplete. Every founder I like wants better practice on how to filter feedback, ask the right follow-ups, and keep conviction from calcifying into obstinacy.
If you teach entrepreneurship, or if you’re trying to learn it on your own, prioritize exercises that train judgment: 1. Role-play investor conversations, but swap roles often so you learn both listening and pitching. 2. Analyze case studies, but always ask, what was the context, what changed, and why would that happen again or not. 3. Practice one-minute rebuttals where you calmly translate criticism into an actionable insight or dismiss it with evidence.
Bring entrepreneurs into the classroom, not as motivational poster people, but as scrappy, contradictory humans. They’ll teach nuance that papers and textbooks can’t.
Entrepreneurship is less a recipe and more a skillset of disciplined improvisation. You need the stubbornness to see an idea through, and the curiosity to revise it when the world says otherwise. The stubborn person without curiosity builds monuments that nobody visits. The curious person without stubbornness chases every bright shiny insight until nothing finishes.
If you can balance conviction with a simple, honest feedback filter, you’ll make fewer catastrophic mistakes, and you’ll probably build something people actually want. And that counts for more than the perfect pitch deck.
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