Arnold Schwarzenegger tweeted something last week that I haven’t been able to get out of my head.

Before he was rich and famous, he was literally a bricklayer. He and Franco Columbu laid brick in Venice to pay the bills while they pursued bodybuilding. Arnold recently wrote about what that job taught him about accomplishing difficult things.

I’m going to let him explain this part himself:

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There is a business lesson buried in there that I think first-time entrepreneurs desperately need to hear.

You need to develop a bricklayer’s mindset.

This week, I want you to focus on developing a Bricklayer’s Mindset: focusing on the work directly in front of you while giving the results enough time to catch up.

The problem with constantly checking the wall
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​One of the hardest parts about starting a business is that effort and results rarely arrive at the same time.

You can spend an entire Saturday researching an industry and make $0.

You can interview ten potential customers and make $0.

You can spend a week figuring out your pricing and make $0.

You can build a basic financial model, learn how your industry works, identify competitors, create an offer, contact potential customers, and still make $0.

From the outside, it can look like nothing is happening.

This is where people get discouraged.

They lay three bricks, stand back, stare at them, and wonder why they don’t have a wall yet.

Then they go online.

Bad idea.

Now they are comparing their three bricks to somebody else’s finished house.

Social media screws up your sense of time

Entrepreneurship on social media has a timeline problem.

You see the announcement.

“WE JUST HIT $1 MILLION IN REVENUE!”

You see the new office, the big launch, the acquisition, the 100,000 followers, or the screenshot showing $37,462 in sales.

You rarely see Tuesday night three years earlier when that person was sitting at a kitchen table trying to figure out why nobody responded to the 14 emails they sent that morning.

The result is visible. The accumulation usually isn’t.

And I think that gives first-time founders a warped idea of how quickly a business should start working.

I’ve been in business for more than a decade. I’ve also helped more than 1,600 businesses. Most real businesses I’ve encountered were built much less dramatically than the internet would have you believe.

Someone learned something.

Then they tried something.

Then they screwed something up.

Then they learned from it.

Then they found a customer.

Then another.

They improved their offer. Got better at selling it. Made some money. Lost some money. Built relationships. Earned referrals. Developed a reputation.

Brick.

Brick.

Brick.

Eventually, there was something substantial enough to call a business.

Measure the bricks you can control

There is an important distinction here because “just keep working” can become terrible advice.

You can spend six months laying bricks in the wrong direction.

Hard work doesn’t rescue a bad business idea. Persistence doesn’t create demand. And spending 400 hours designing a website nobody visits certainly counts as work, but I’m not giving you a medal for it.

The bricks have to contribute to the wall.

That means early founders should pay attention to leading indicators, the actions that eventually produce the result you want.

Suppose your ultimate goal is to make your first $1,000.

You cannot directly control whether someone buys today.

You can control whether you:

• talk to five potential customers;
• research your competitors;
• test your pricing;
• improve your offer based on feedback;
• learn the basic financial side of your business;
• create a simple way for someone to pay you;
• make another offer tomorrow.

Those are bricks.

Revenue is the wall.

This matters because staring at revenue every day during the earliest stages of a business can make perfectly reasonable progress feel like failure.

There simply isn’t enough wall yet.

Some bricks need to come back out

There is one other part of the analogy that matters.

Building a business requires occasionally discovering that you laid a brick in the wrong place.

Your original idea might need to change.

Customers may hate the name you loved.

Your pricing may be wrong.

The marketing strategy you were certain would work may produce absolutely nothing.

Good.

You learned something while the wall was still small.

Early entrepreneurship involves laying bricks, stepping back occasionally to check your direction, making adjustments, and continuing.

The trick is finding the balance.

Check constantly and you’ll drive yourself crazy because progress looks painfully slow up close.

Never check and you might spend a year building something nobody wants.

So put your head down and work. Then, at reasonable intervals, step back and evaluate what the work is telling you.

That’s how businesses actually get built.

Weekend Exercise: Choose Your Bricks

If you want to start a business but feel like you haven’t made much progress yet, I want you to stop measuring yourself against the finished businesses you see around you.

For this weekend, write down five concrete things you can do next week to move yourself closer to starting your business. Research an industry. Talk to a potential customer. Compare competitors. Learn how pricing works. Estimate startup costs. Whatever stage you’re at, identify five bricks.

Then next Friday, count them.

Don’t write down everything you meant to do. Write down what you actually did.

Don’t focus on where you want to be 10 years from now, instead measure whether you’re consistently laying bricks.