10 More Things Neil Peart and Rush Taught Me About Entrepreneurship

Neil Peart: those of us who admired the legendary Rush drummer, his lyrics, and his overall modus vivendi are still mourning his untimely passing. There was such a positive and passionate reaction to my recent Inc. story about Rush’s lessons for entrepreneurs, and such rich material in his lyrics, that the piece deserved a sequel. The following are ten more lessons that recently departed “professor” had for entrepreneurship, and life:

1. Refuse to be the pawn

It’s time I was king, now not just one more pawn….
Fly by night, goodbye my dear
My ship isn’t coming and I just can’t pretend

(“Fly By Night,” Fly By Night, 1975)

In the title track of Rush’s second album, Fly By Night, which was the first record for Neil Peart and his lyrical pen, we have one of the central motivations for entrepreneurship: autonomy. Aware of the perils of passivity, Peart is prepared to “fly by night” to eventually achieve kingly control over his own destiny.

2. Think big

In a world where I feel so smallI can’t stop thinking big

(“Caravan,” Clockwork Angels, 2012)

The ability to think big is one of the hallmarks of a great entrepreneur. Guest lecturing at my Stanford “Ingenious Entrepreneurship” course, Learnvest founder Alexa von Tobel advised my students to imagine the regret they would feel as an 80-year-old if they didn’t take sizable risks now.

Restaurant mogul Danny Meyer also addressed how to overcome narrow thinking by urging my students to ask themselves, “Whoever wrote the rule….?” when considering an exciting but risky new idea. Had he not applied that liberating mindset to Shake Shack, Gramercy Tavern, and so many other of his winning food concepts, the world would be a far less flavorful place.

Thinking big as an entrepreneur, of course, also involves pursuing a business model that is “scalable” – i.e., has the potential for high growth into new markets and geographies.

3. Leverage the fearlessness of youth

When we are young…
Learning that we’re only immortal
For a limited time

(“Dreamline,” Roll the Bones, 1991)

While recent research suggests that middle-aged founders may succeed more often than younger ones, there is still much to br said for taking your first entrepreneurial shot while in the blush of youth. With fewer family, health, and economic constraints, whippersnapper founders can leverage their time-limited sense of “immortality” to overcome the challenges of building a business.

What the young lack in experience, they make up for with naive derring-do, as Neil Peart encapsulated in 1991’s “The Big Wheel”: “Well, I was only a kid, didn’t know enough to be afraid/ Playing the game, but not the way the big boys played/ Nothing to lose, maybe I had something to trade.”

4. Be ferocious

It is the engine that drives itself
But it chooses the uphill climb

(“Cut to the Chase,” Counterparts, 1993)

Successful entrepreneurship requires a herculean work ethic. Founders must be self-starting workaholics, willing to toil around the clock and drive themselves to the point of obsession. Early in Microsoft’s history, Bill Gates’ “uphill climb” involved coding at his desk until he would pass out from exhaustion. Elon Musk is infamous for his 120-hour work weeks. Jeff Bezos is so hardcore that he uses “Gradatim Ferociter” (Latin for “step by step, ferociously”) as the motto for his spaceflight company Blue Origin. Peart himself was legendary for his endless practicing; he would even practice before rehearsals with the band, essentially practicing to practice.

Such burning intensity can exact a cost, as echoed by Neil Peart’s lyrics from the 1976 song, “Something for Nothing”: “You don’t get something for nothing/You can’t have freedom for free.” That sacrifice, for some founders, are friendships, relationships, and sometimes sanity.

5. Seek guidance

I stand atop a spiral stair
An oracle confronts me there
He leads me on light years away
Through astral nights, galactic days

(“2112. Oracle: The Dream,” 2112, 1976)

Like the oracle in Rush’s opus 2112, advisors are critically important to the entrepreneurial journey. Venture capitalist Vinod Khosla was not exaggerating when he offered that, “The single most important thing an entrepreneur needs to learn is whom to take advice from and on what topic”. At minimum, founders should have a trusted, energetic board of advisors that offer a diversity of viewpoints and proficiencies.

Even better is a personal mentor on whom you can call in times of uncertainty and hardship. Oprah Winfrey often consulted the late poet and sage Maya Angelou. Bill Gates has repeatedly sought the counsel of Warren Buffet.

At my course Danny Meyer spoke of how the longtime owner of Sparks steakhouse, the late Pat Cetta, was critical to his learning how to manage people and develop his much-emulated philosophy of “enlightened hospitality”.

6. Be a sponge for learning

He picks up scraps of information/ He’s adept at adaptation

(“Digital Man,” Signals, 1982)

An effective entrepreneur is a veritable digital man or woman, absorbing “scraps of information” at every opportunity, forever reading, learning, and questioning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella put it crisply when he said, “Don’t be a know-it-all; be a learn-it-all.”

The most important information is that which comes from users. An entrepreneur must continually ask them what works and what needs improvement, and adapt the business accordingly. As Sweetgreen cofounder Nicholas Jammet told my students a few weeks ago, he and his cofounders are constantly seeking feedback from their customers: “Our focus is maniacal; we are constantly testing hypotheses and iterating the Sweetgreen concept.”

7. Investors seek the real thing

It’s hard to recognize the real thing
It comes along once in a while

(“Grand Designs,” Power Windows, 1985)

Most would agree that the essential pillars of a “grand design” business are the business idea, the size of its market, and the quality of its founders. For seasoned investors, the last factor is often most important, as the business’ chances for success dramatically increase if the founders are “the real thing”. VC types want to see that the entrepreneurs have requisite grit – the fortitude to stick to their vision and execute relentlessly in a world of scarce resources.  But they also are looking for a measure of adaptability: those with willingness and ingenuity to pivot the business when the market demands it. Deft entrepreneurs can make the most of an average idea, but weak founders can destroy the grandest of designs.

8. Build your endurance

You can make the most of the distance
First you need endurance
First you’ve got to last

(“Marathon,” Hold Your Fire, 1987)

How does an entrepreneur make the most of the distance? You have to develop your endurance like an athlete by eating sensibly, hitting the gym, and getting sufficient sleep. It is often difficult for founders to remember to put on their oxygen masks first and practice self-care amid the relentless demands of a startup. Fortunately, there are now a multitude of apps and websites  to help founders to take regular breaks, practice meditation, engage in walking meetings, and block out the innumerable digital distractions.

9. Differentiate

Everybody got to elevate
From the norm

(“Vital Signs,” Moving Pictures, 1981)

The most promising businesses have an economic “moat” – that is, a sustainable competitive advantage over other firms in their category. When he spoke to my students a few weeks ago, Bluestone Lane founder and Melbourne native Nicholas Stone said that when he entered the crowded coffee chain business he took pains to elevate his concept from the norm established by Starbucks. This meant delivering an experience based on the principles of the Australian coffee culture in which he was raised: higher quality coffee, friendlier customer service, and more intriguing, nourishing food such as the company’s famous, Instagram-friendly “avo smash”.

10. Persevere

Why does it happen?
Because it happens.
Roll the bones.

(“Roll the Bones,” Roll the Bones, 1991)

There is not a startup in history that has not experienced setbacks and dead ends, a great many also endure full-scale failures and near-death experiences. An entrepreneur needs to learn from misfortunate without dwelling on it — fail forward, as they say. The sooner one realizes that failure is an inevitable part of the startup process, the easier it is to persevere and “roll the bones,” which is an old-fashioned term for rolling the dice.

Elaborating on the song’s title in an interview, Neil Peart explained that, “The bottom line…is to take the chance, roll the bones, if it’s a random universe and that’s terrifying and it makes you neurotic and everything, never mind. You really have to take the chance or else nothing’s going to happen.”

A Liquid RUSH with Hall of Fame Inductee Alex Lifeson

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame became a credible institution today as it finally — finally! — announced its intention to induct legendary rockers RUSH.  A high raise of the chalice to these fine Canadian musicians for trailblazing their unique path to success without ever having to compromise their artistic vision and integrity.  And as their new album, A Clockwork Angels, demonstrates, they are rocking harder, looser, and funkier than ever before.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

In hopeful anticipation of the overdue Rock Hall honor, I launched this Drink Bravely video with guitar virtuoso and wine collector Alex Lifeson two days ago.  The video has already garnered thousands of views, and as you’ll see, his fascinating home cellar includes everything from Côte-Rôtie from France’s Rhone Valley to Madeira from Portugal to Australian Shiraz to Swedish Aquavit, all of which, you might note, would make an excellent holiday gift for the wine lover (and Rush fan) in your life.  So catch the mystery, catch the drift: Liquid Rush: Digging Into Alex Lifeson’s Wine Cellar.

Wine Collector Reflections: Twelve Different DRC’s, Courtesy of a Maker of Moments

Wine Collector Reflections: Twelve Different DRC’s, Courtesy of a Maker of Moments

If, as they say, time is a thief, then I know a wine collector who has the opposite effect: he makes moments.  He doesn’t collect wine to flaunt his connoisseurship or to create chest-thumping, my-bottle-is-bigger-than-yours displays.  His approach is quite the opposite.

wine collector
The unlikely intersection of exquisite taste and extraordinary generosity

This collector, of course, prizes wine and enjoys watching it evolve through the years.  I suspect that he also digs the intellectual complexity and maddening elusiveness that surrounds red Burgundy, his bottle-borne Emile Flöge.  But even more than this, he derives quiet pleasure — a delight that registers foremost in his eyes – from sharing his formidable collection with others, including those who can’t necessarily rattle off how many bottles are in a Nebuchadnezzar.

In this way, he fulfils the almost talismanic potential of wine to be both an accessory and a catalyst for life’s great gatherings.  When else do we find reason to get together as a happy tribe, experience new sensations, and, well, get a bit buzzed to boot?

This wine collector – this maker of moments — is all the more uncommon given that many wine enthusiasts (myself included) are guilty of not often enough stepping aside from our daily maelstroms to break out the good stuff.  Like dutiful investors, we buy and hold, waiting for just the right moment to justify opening our good bottles for loved ones.  We wait to seize a moment that often never happens.

So your mandate, fair reader, as is mine, is to use wine to become a maker of moments among your own tribes.  Doing so with special bottles heightens the occasion, but it need not involve great expense or effort, certainly nowhere near that which comprised the rarefied tasting described below.  It can be as simple as hosting a gather to introduce you friends to the pleasures of Petite Sirah or Chinon or American sparkling wine.

In Oldman’s Brave New World of Wine, astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson, himself an accomplished maker of moments, emphasizes that wine is really just a means of “breaking bread” with others and reflect on a the time and region evoked by a particular bottle.  While relaxing with his bandmates in a scene from Rush’s award-winning documentary, Alex Lifeson, another wine-passionate “Braveheart” with whom I spoke, offers this playful insight: “It’s so great to drink wine.  It tastes fantastic.  And it makes you feel funny.”

Wine need not be any more complicated than that, although three weeks ago, the aforementioned wine collector organized a tasting that was a bit more serious, though no less spirited.  He brought together a group of eighteen friends, most of whom were not wine pros, to taste twelve different bottlings of Domaine de la Romanée-Conti, also known, in venerated tones, as “DRC”.  If red Burgundy is the wine type that arguably inspires the most ecclesiastical reverence among connoisseurs, then the vineyards of DRC are wine’s most sacred spot, its Swayambhunath Stupa.  Drawing from tiny vineyards in the Burgundian village of Vosne-Romanée, DRC is the source of almost impossibly nuanced and long-lived Pinot Noir, able to display a haunting complexity that transcends words and most mortals’ bank accounts.  For each of four vintages – 1990, 1999, 2000, and 2005 — we tasted bottlngs from three DRC grand cru vineyards, La Tâche, Richebourg, and Romanée-Saint-Vivant.

It should be noted that to actually own wines of this caliber, and also be willing to share it on the scale that the collector did, supplying more than enough for both a blind tasting and a sit-down dinner, is a level of largesse that would astonish even the most coddled wine collector.  It is the unlikely, moment-making intersection of exquisite taste and extraordinary generosity.

wine collecting

1990, 1999, 2000, & 2005 Domaine de la Romanée-Conti
appellations: La Tâche, Richebourg, Romanée-Saint-Vivant

All twelve wines were tasted blind, and the group was asked to rank the wines of each vintage from 1 (best) to 3 for which is best for current or near-term drinking.
1990
La Tâche (3rd)
Richebourg (2nd)
Romanée-Saint-Vivant (1st)
1999
La Tâche(tied for 1st)
Richebourg (2nd)
Romanée-Saint-Vivant (tied for 1st)
2000
La Tâche (3rd)
Richebourg (2nd)
Romanée-Saint-Vivant (1st)
2005
La Tâche (tied for 2nd)
Richebourg (tied for 2nd)
Romanée-Saint-Vivant (1st)
Best overall wine in the group’s blind tasting:
1999 DRC La Tâche