The School of Greatness - 735 Stop Overthinking and Start Doing with Gunnar Lovelace

Episode Date: December 21, 2018

DON'T LET PERFECT BE THE ENEMY OF GOOD. We can talk ourselves out of almost anything. “I’m not good enough.” “I’m not ready.” “I don’t have all the skills.” But what if you just took the plunge? What if you risked things not being “perfect” and put yourself out there? You might fail, but you’ll learn a lot more than if you had never shown your project to the world. It’s like I always say- the biggest risk takers are the most interesting. For this Five Minute Friday, I revisited a conversation I had with the entrepreneur Gunnar Lovelace who is passionate about telling people that it’s ok to make mistakes. Growing up poor with a single mom left Gunnar with a burning desire to create wealth to do good. As a result, he is a five-time serial entrepreneur focused on social impact at scale (people, planet + profit). Gunnar is the founder and CSO of Thrive Market, which offers organic groceries online at wholesale prices nationally. It has raised $200 million and grown to seven million users and 700 employees in three years. Gunnar shares that part of the reason he is so successful is that he didn’t know everything when he started. He says that you need to get in the driver’s seat instead of overthinking. Learn how to battle your perfectionism and dive into your dreams in Episode 735. In This Episode You Will Learn: What Gunnar tells his entrepreneurial friends (1:30) Why it’s important to make mistakes (2:00) How to use fear as a teacher (3:00) Why you need real market feedback (4:00)

This is 5-Minute Friday! Welcome everyone to this episode, a very special one because we have a special human being on, a dear friend of mine that I've connected with recently who is up to a big game in life and is looking to transform the world and the health that we experience in the world. His name is Gennar Lovelace, and he is a serial entrepreneur in nonprofits, technology, fashion, and real estate. But most recently, he is the founder and co-CEO of Thrive Market, which is the largest e-commerce

company in LA and is revolutionizing the health food industry. Now, it seems like it'd be a lot to learn how to create this animation cartoon company at 21, essentially, and then understand how to teach education at the same time. Did you have a lot of people working with you? How big was the company? It was about 20 of us. 20 of you. So it wasn't a big company. You started it yourself? You were the founder? Started it. And then we ended up selling the company about a year into the project, which was great. I mean, it wasn't a huge hit, but it was a great, you know, it was like 21.

And I had a nice win. And yeah, I mean, for me personally, I think one of the things that nice win. And yeah, I mean, for me personally, I think one of the things that has always been my orientation to life is just like learn as ferociously as possible. And it's one of the things that I tell a lot of my other entrepreneurial friends, particularly women that I think are actually more qualified than men often, but think that they need to know more and prepare more. And I think that we often overthink what we need to do next. And instead, the most valuable thing that we can do is just put ourselves into the situation, get into the driver's seat, make the mistakes and see the real world dynamic instead of try to overthink it. And that, to me, personally, has been such a powerful learning lesson over and over and over again. Like,

like I've never built a company like Thrive Market before, you know, we're 400 employees. I've never operated with 400 employees before, but you know, you just have to like, you lean into it and you're honest with yourself and honest with your leadership team and, and make a lot of mistakes and make sure that there's a culture that it's okay to make mistakes while still being very oriented towards excellence and performance and just be willing to learn. And I think that's such, and I know you share that. I mean, that's what your work's all about. Yeah. It's interesting you say that because a lot of entrepreneurs that reach out or email me, and I'm sure you get the same thing. They're always asking a lot of questions. They have fears, they have doubts, concerns about putting themselves out there, creating a product or a company.

And they always ask, how did you do it? And I'm always like, to be honest, I was just so ignorant about how to do it that I didn't have the fear of looking bad or looking silly. I was willing to put myself out there and try and take a lot of action over and over and make mistakes. A lot of people just aren't willing to make those mistakes. They don't want to look bad in their family or friends. It sounds like that's what you did. You were just willing to put yourself out there and learn as you've...

Yeah, they're like learning opportunities. It is a mistake, but it's also compost for what's going to come next. It's like a fertile terrain for which the next seed will come. Exactly. And it's that willingness to just fall down over and over again and pick yourself back up. And there's going to be things that really work well. And all it takes is a few things to work well. That's it. You don't have to be perfect at everything. That's right. And you look at most people that have been really successful in their lives, they've all had similar experiences, you know? And I think, I think, you know, you

sound like you had inherent confidence. I did not. I was really insecure. And I've always used fear as like a teacher for me. So like wherever I was afraid of something, I would be like, okay, I'm really terrified of this. So I'm actually going to go try to do it because I'm really scared of this. And I can tell like that just became an early teacher for me. And I think to the point of the conversation, I think it's such a powerful thing just to be willing to take the plunge, get into it. And, you know, I love the mantra, don't let perfect be the enemy of good. We are always over-training. We're always over-thinking and we're always trying to make it perfect. You know, get out there as quickly as possible. Friends of mine that are starting businesses are thinking about ideas like, is this right? Is it good enough? And you know, I need another six months to like make this perfect.

And I'm just like, stop it. Just stop it. Like get out there. There's nothing better than having real market feedback, real people touching it, real people giving you inner feedback about what they think about it. And that's actually the fastest way to iterate on it.