Don’t believe the hype. For the founder, entrepreneurship is bloody hard. (And for the record, for the female founder, you can pretty much 10x the hard.)
In the earliest stages, when you’re building something that didn’t exist before, there are no road maps, no rules, many ups, as many downs, big wins, crushing losses, wild guesses, giant leaps, wakeful nights, scant funds – and plenty of days when you wonder why the f you started.
Yes – you can have incredible advisors and champions and supporters. But ultimately, you’re the one who gets up each day to a mountain of uncertainty and unknowns and problems to solve, and you’re the one who has to repeatedly turn the worm.
The truth is that no startup comes easy. There are years of grit behind any “overnight success”.
It’s hard, hard work. Ridiculous. Relentless. Off the richter.
But entrepreneurs know all this.
That’s why they’re outliers. They’ve already made their first difficult choices, often stepped away from the safety of ‘9-5’ jobs to challenge status quo, push out of the comfort zone and smash their own glass ceilings because they’ve seen an opportunity where others didn’t.
What I do know is that women also climb invisible mountains every day.
And it’s indomitable female founders like Laura Youngson who are redefining success on their own terms, breaking new ground, and building incredible businesses the world didn’t know it needed.
Laura’s eureka moment came on a volcanic ash pitch, 5,714 metres above sea level, on Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro in June 2017.
An ambitious entrepreneur, gender activist and Co-Founder of global non-profit Equal Playing Field and Ida Sports, Laura had a crazy idea that if she could convince two teams of female soccer players from 20 countries to join her on an expedition up a mountain to set the Guinness World Record for the highest altitude game of soccer ever played, they could literally change the game for women and girls the world over.
The record made news across the planet, and set Laura on a path she could never have foreseen.
This is a recent conversation I had with Laura on Human Cogs about what happened next – about shifting identities, showing up, and how it’s mostly the failures that shape us and make us.
Laura lays bare the bones of the entrepreneurial journey; the shadow side of striving; the relentless juggle of businesses and babies that many female founders somehow make work; and reminds us that even if the odds are stacked hard against you, if we can each just summit the limits we impose on ourselves, well, women and girls can do pretty much anything they put their minds to.
Laura Youngson – Thanks for sharing your story, and for being the legend you are. Please keep going.
The world’s women and girls need you to 🙂
#IWD2022 #breakthebias
SHOW CREDITS
Hosts: Sabina Read and Madeleine Grummet
Guest: Laura Youngson
Links: Ida Sports, Equal Playing Field, LinkedIn
Technical Producer: Daryl Missen at Purple Wax
Join us on instagram at human.cogs
Available on Apple, Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts or listen via our website.
If you like this episode please leave us a QUICK REVIEW so more people can listen and learn from these stories! Thank you 🙂
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