Resilience is overrated. This is what keeps businesses alive and thriving

Resilience is a favorite buzzword for many entrepreneurs. You’ll see it throughout pitch decks, founder stories, and LinkedIn posts. The idea is, if you’re able to endure enough, you’ll successfully come out the other side.

Some 83% of founders experience high stress, struggling with imposter syndrome and rapidly losing confidence in the idea they were certain would work out. In this context, the resilience story is a motivating one. But the idea is also highly misleading.

Among the 90% of startups that fail, most founders are likely resilient right up until the end. They push through setbacks and persist with their idea, despite plenty of evidence suggesting that it won’t work.

Take Theranos, which likely started with good intentions, forging on despite its product failing to live up to its claims. Ultimately, this resulted in the founder and her deputy being sent to prison. Or MySpace, once the leader in social media, which continued to focus on aggressive monetization over user experience, even as Facebook stole market share.

The unfortunate truth is that one of the key factors of being an entrepreneur is knowing what challenges aren’t worth enduring, and when a change is needed instead.

It’s adaptability that makes the difference

As a founder, one of my most formative experiences was getting robbed in Los Angeles.

I had a flight booked to leave the United States and head back to Europe. Yet, without my ID or immigration documents, I had to stay an additional six months while waiting for replacements.

I spent the days afterward telling myself not to worry and that everything would be okay, until it dawned on me that wishful thinking wouldn’t keep a roof over my head. I had to accept the reality of the situation and find a way to deal with it before my problems became a whole lot worse. So I took a job as a director’s assistant on a film set, and spent the next few months there.

That ordeal taught me an incredibly valuable lesson: When things go wrong (and they inevitably will), what gets you through isn’t showing strength, but finding a way through it. Resilience helps you to cope with adversity, but dealing with it requires adaptability. You have to be willing to do the difficult but necessary thing.

It’s a distinction that has seen many startups turn a bad idea into billions of dollars. Instagram started as a mobile check-in app, and the founders of YouTube originally conceived it as a video dating platform. Shopify began as a snowboarding store, and Slack was an internal tool for a gaming company.

Would blind resilience have achieved the same result? Chances are, without change, those big names would have ended in early failure.

Avoiding necessary change isn’t showing resilience

I went to my first day on set expecting to be introduced to cutting-edge, high-tech ways of working. After all, it was Hollywood, where they throw billions around. Instead, I found myself underwhelmed by how outdated and inefficient the entire preproduction process was.

People were still managing script breakdowns, schedules, and budgets on Word and Excel (and occasionally even on paper). Reviews and approvals could take months, if not years. And simple mistakes would add days to shoots, increasing production costs.

Any attempt to point out these inefficiencies resulted in some variation of how it’s “the way the industry has always worked.” It’s a mentality that many industries have struggled to shift, and while they’re often confused, resistance to change isn’t resilience. It’s stubbornness that often holds businesses back and threatens their long-term survival.

True resilience isn’t sticking to the status quo, but keeping the show going when a pandemic shuts down in-person production, or staying afloat when war grinds your logistic line to a halt. Adaptability, on the other hand, is not only about surviving those hardships, but being ready and willing to change no matter what the world throws at you.

Change catches up to everyone eventually

Resilience will only get you so far, especially during times of change. Ask Blockbuster, which turned down the opportunity to acquire Netflix—now a $400 billion company—for $50 million, putting its faith in its own model despite brick and mortar’s clear struggles. Or Yahoo, which passed on acquiring Google for $1 million after underestimating the growth potential of search.

We’re now in a similar spot with artificial intelligence. While it’s still in its infancy, it’s already setting those who invest in it apart:45% of organizations say they’re achieving a great deal of value from AI, and an additional 45% say they’re achieving moderate value. Less than 1% say the investment isn’t paying off at all.

For a relatively small investment, companies big and small can drastically improve their efficiency. I’ve seen it with my startup, Filmustage. By leveraging AI, production teams have already saved over 3.5 million hours of manual work. That brings costs down dramatically, with studios having saved over $119 million.

Founders pay a price if they insist on doing things “the way the industry always has.” Resilience may delay the inevitable, but without adaptability, budgets eventually bleed dry and businesses cannot survive.

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