Starting Something New is Like a Roller Coaster Ride

ANALOGY alert!!

The book that I will be discussing in this blog post is The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster by Darren Hardy (the same author of the other book I talk about countless times in this blog, The Compound Effect).

One of the reasons why I love this book is because of the use of analogies.

I love analogies because they make things easy for me to understand, and makes things easier for me to explain.

Of course, one of the analogies used in this book was a roller coaster. It’s all about how the journey to success is not just a straight line, but is instead like a roller coaster.

This blog post will outline some of the key insights in the book, specifically with the analogy. The book has been focused on the journey of entrepreneurship, but writing this blog made me realise that it can also be about the journey of starting something new.

ANALOGY 1 – Roller Coaster

TICKET BOOTH – Deciding Whether to Start

A journey to starting something new, is a decision that only we ourselves can make.

Just like waiting in line of a ticket booth for a roller coaster, we can make the decision to either get the ticket, or walk away from it.

But once we get that ticket, we have already taken the first step. Now it’s time to go on the roller coaster, where it may be the ride of our life.

It’s going to be scary at first, but we keep in the back of our mind that it’s going to be fun.

It’s just like starting a new journey – deciding to start is the first step. We already know that it’s going to be scary. We may be a bit scared of the risks or what people will think, but we keep in the back of our mind that the whole journey is going to be a fun one to look back on.

HEIGHT REQUIREMENT

Kind of laughed at this part because it mentions how in some rides, there’s a height requirement, and therefore there’s a lined board which would determine whether or not you’re tall enough for the ride. My family takes every opportunity to make the “are you tall enough” jokes whenever we are lined up for a ride at Disneyland.

If I was a kid, that would be reasonable. I remember when I would do everything I could to be tall enough to ride a particular ride. I would be a bit nervous wondering whether I was tall enough.

It’s the same with a journey to starting something new. For me, it’s the journey to blogging. There are already standards set in place for running a blog, and I remember being nervous on whether or not I was fit for running my own blog and writing blog posts. I was always wondering whether or not I was good enough.

But after a few months of blogging, I realised that I was good at writing after all.

However, going back to the roller coaster example, let’s say that a kid did meet the height requirement for the ride. BUT the kid actually didn’t want to go on the ride after all. Pretty much, meeting the height requirement didn’t matter because he wasn’t going to enjoy the ride anyway.

It’s the same with any journey of starting something, like entrepreneurship – Darren Hardy had pointed out that the first and most important factor in building something is that you have to love it.

I resonated with that. I know for me with my blog, even though I may have “met the standards” for writing blogs, all of that didn’t matter if I didn’t even enjoy blogging and writing in the first place.

SECURE YOUR SHOULDER HARNESS

This may all sound familiar when going on a roller coaster – we start off with excitement and expectations, then the ride begins…

It’s easy to anticipate what’s going to happen at first.

The ride starts, it goes slow. You go higher and higher, and then the higher you go, the more your view expands. It’s at a slow pace, and it seems like everything is going to be like this.

But then, without warning, you get unexpected dips and turns. The ride goes dark, you can’t even see what’s going to happen next.

Every turn and dip is a shock.

One instant thought we may have is that there’s no possible way to survive this.

BUT once the ride is finished, it’s relieving and you realise how much fun that actually was.

Sound familiar? Yes, because it’s the same with the journey of starting something new.

For example, the journey of starting a new business.

You start off excited about starting this business, and have high expectations and hopes for it. Then you actually start it.

It’s easy to anticipate what’s going to happen – you learn the skills and it becomes fun, it seems like everything is going to be like this. It seems that we have found our passion, and that there will be no problems in pursuing this.

But then, without warning, we get unexpected challenges. We get a hectic schedule, we have challenges in getting sales, we get unanticipated competition. We can’t even predict what’s going to happen next.

In the moment, it feels like there’s no possible way to get through this. Everything is hectic and so much is happening at once, it’s easy to feel like giving up at this point.

But once that ride is finished, it’s relieving and you look back and realise how fun that journey was.

Yes, maybe the hectic schedule and lack of sales was not fun, but it makes a good story to look back on.

So pretty much, a roller coaster ride can be applied to anything new that we begin.

You may have noticed that we can’t really succeed in anything if we end up quitting. Just like a roller coaster, terror is part of the thrill. The roller coaster would be quite boring if it was slow and predictable the entire time. It’s only fun when we get the unexpected. The same with starting something new.

ANALOGY 2 – Crab Analogy

There’s this other analogy besides the roller coaster that was mentioned in the book – the crab analogy.

We may have heard of this one before.

The crab trap – a wire cage with a hole at the top. Bait is placed and lowered in the water. A crab goes to get the bait, and then another crab follows.

Once the crabs are in there, they never leave the cage. This is because when one crab leaves, the other crabs will do anything they can do to stop him, and they’ll go to extreme lengths. They will do everything they can like tearing off his claws, and if he still persists, they will kill him.

This sounds really familiar to the real world.

When something is popular, it’s easy to follow. Just like the crab trap, when one crab enters the cage, the other crab follows, and then another, and another.

So when someone comes along and starts something new, whether that be starting a business, or just doing something that is completely out of the norm, they may have other people, such as their family and friends, pulling them back from starting it.

They will say various things to make that person not start their business such as saying “it’s too risky” or “it’s going to be too hard”, and they may even also get persistent too, just like the crabs.

I’ve heard plenty of stories on books and podcasts on how people have started their successful businesses. One of the most common obstacles I hear is how the person would usually have family and friends tell them that “it’s not going to work” or that they are “wasting their time”.

Unlike the crabs, if the person is so persistent in starting and continuing their business, then the other people holding them back probably won’t kill them.

Overall Review (How the Analogies Apply to Real Life)

Compound Effect

A lot of my blogs like to mention the Compound Effect in some way.

Going back to how the roller coaster has the unexpected twists and turns that make us question if we are going to survive, that’s the stage where most people would give up on their goals. There were plenty of times when I questioned whether or not I was going to get through my new hectic schedule and the challenge of keeping this blog up.

But the compound effect tells us that the small actions we take in the moment, over a day, or even a few days, weeks, and months, will show nothing. Over a longer period of time, we would eventually see those results that we’ve been working hard for.

Then, just like finishing a roller coaster, we look back and realise how fun the journey actually was, and how boring of a story it would be if we didn’t have those twists and turns along our way.

Passion

One of the common delusions of passion, is that when we are passionate about something, we’re not going to experience the pain and the problems.

The truth is that pain is part of the process, just like how the thrills and the uncertainty of the roller coaster is part of the ride.

It’s the same thing as above, once we accomplish our goals, the best part to look back on is how we survived the uncertainty and challenges, just like how we would look back on when just finished riding a roller coaster. When we look back at our favourite roller coaster ride, are we going to remember the slow and predictable parts of the ride, or the thrills and unexpected turns of it?

Failures

The unexpected twists and turns in a roller coaster may refer to some of the failures that we face.

There will be failures and uncertainty, and just like questioning whether we’ll survive the big dips of a roller coaster, we question whether we’ll get through these challenges.

But then what happens once we finish the roller coaster? We look back at the the thrill we got when we went through those unexpected twists and turns, we’re not looking back at the predictable parts of the ride.

Of course, it’s the same with our failures and challenges. Those are what we look back on. Most of the time, we are probably not going to look back at the good times when we started off, we’re going to remember more of the challenges we face, and how we faced them.

So are we going to hop on the ride of the roller coaster?

Starting something new is… scary (like a roller coaster!).

But the only way to know if we are going to succeed is that if we keep going.

Something that I like to think about whether I feel like I just want to stop, is that I think about this analogy (what a surprise at this point right?):

The more unexpected twists, turns, and dips on a roller coaster, the more fun the roller coaster is right?

So the more unexpected challenges and obstacles that I face, the more fun the whole journey of starting this new thing would be.

Because which ones are the most enjoyable roller coasters? – the roller coaster with the most thrill, or the roller coaster that is the most predictable?

Book(s) this post was inspired by:

(not sponsored in any way!)

• The Entrepreneur Roller Coaster – Darren Hardy
• The Compound Effect – Darren Hardy
• The Delusion of Passion – Mark Nathan and David Anderson
• Failing Forward – John Maxwell

Disclaimer: If you think that any of what I had written was good, the credit actually belongs to the one whose book was the inspiration for this post. If there’s anything on here that you think is quite stupid, that’s 100% blame on me 🙂

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