The “Resistance” Will Stop Your Business from Shipping New Products and Services

This morning on the blog, Zen Habits, business-genius, Seth Godin, wrote a guest post on “The Reason You’re Stuck (and the one best way to avoid the six ways that will keep you stuck).”

In the post, Godin defined two terms that are extremely relevant to all people, including business owners:

• Ship—“Ship as in get it out the door,” Godin says in the post. “Ship as in make a difference at work. Ship as in contribute your art and vision and expertise and passion to the project you’re working on.”
• The Resistance—“The resistance is that little voice in the back of your head, the one that tells you that it will never work, the one that insists you check your email one last time, the one that worries that people will laugh at you,” he says.
  
  “The resistance loves committees and it hates a mission,” Godin says. “The resistance creates fear and uncertainty, and it will do almost anything to keep you from being noticed. There’s a biological underpinning to the resistance–your amygdala. The amygdala is the pre-historic portion of your brain, located near the brain stem. It’s responsible for fear and anger and revenge and sex and survival. When the amygdala is aroused, when it feels threatened, when there’s a sense that people might actually laugh at you, it takes over. It rises up in rage and fear and shuts you down.
  
  “And so the resistance kicks in,” he says. “The resistance goes to meetings and plays devil’s advocate (I didn’t know the devil needed an advocate.).
  
  “The resistance finds excuses, it makes tasks needlessly complex (or oversimplifies so much that you fail),” he says. “The resistance uses phrases like, ‘see, I told you it would never work.’ The resistance demands that you study the issue more, or grab a Diet Coke, or go visit those friends who are in from out of town and you won’t be able to see them unless you go right now. The resistance invented yak shaving. The resistance is also responsible for giving you an even better idea just before you finish this one… in fact, the resistance will do anything it can to prevent you from shipping.”

 The resistance is an extremely powerful force at work in your life. It’s the thing that keeps you living a mediocre life in a mediocre place with mediocre people. It’s the fear that holds you back from starting that new company or hiring that additional employee or launching that new project.

The resistance is your comfort zone. It’s that place that keeps you playing a small game in life. It’s the thing that keeps you from taking any risks.

“Why do little companies get so much more out the door than big ones?” Godin asks. “Because big companies have committees, groups of people designed to protect the status quo, to prevent failure, to avoid catastrophe.”

What’s the Hold Up?
Godin makes a really excellent point in the post when he talks about how quickly companies can get products shipped.

 He gives the example that Apple is able to get products out the door quicker and more efficiently than Microsoft can because Apple’s products are created by very small teams of people and Microsoft’s products are made by large teams of people.

“The iPod came from two people, Steve [Jobs] and Jonathan [Ive],” Godin says. “The Zune came from 250. Which product would you rather own?”

This relates to the resistance.

When decisions within a company are made by large groups of people, rather than just a few people, there’s more resistance involved, thus making it more difficult to accomplish something quickly or efficiently.

It’s almost like a form of sabotage.

Is your company sabotaging itself?

Do you have too many “checks and balances?” Do too many people need to approve a project before any attention is paid to it? Are there too many people involved in the decision-making process?

All of these excesses are just the resistance in action. Because remember, the resistance will do anything to keep you from shipping.

And you do this by creating a product that’s so fantastic, that you’re so excited about you literally have to work on it. A product that’s so amazing and cool and business-changing that you won’t be able to sleep until you ship it.

That’s the only way to overcome the resistance.

Is your company sabotaging itself?