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Hello and welcome to another episode of Growth Bites. Today we’ll talk about what you can do when the going gets tough: when revenues are down, employees are quitting, your business is in flames – this happens to everyone.

• Even though you know the reward will pay off at the end of the day, dealing with these things can be lonely and depressing. [01:36]
• It all comes down to not giving up, but what do you do when you need motivation? [01:46]
• When things get difficult for me, I visit a post by Alexis Ohanian of Reddit called “Keep Calm and Carry On: What You Didn’t Know About the Reddit Story.” [02:06]
• When things get tough, this post reminds me that things can be a lot worse, and that things really aren’t that bad. Compared to this post, a lot of really bad things haven’t happened to me yet. It allows me to get back up and get back to work. [02:47]
• The story behind the post is that his girlfriend had a terrible accident and was constantly in the hospital. A couple months later, his dog died. Then, his mother is hospitalized with brain cancer at age 51. [03:46]
• “If you’ve worked with the spineless, you know how frustrating it can be to deal with their poisonous helplessness — something that’s only heightened in a startup where the most important thing you can do is not give up. And you’d better fucking believe that when you come home to a mother battling brain cancer and a father spending every waking hour taking care of her and running his own business, you don’t complain, you don’t cower, and you most certainly don’t quit.” [05:57]
• “She fought for far longer than any doctor expected and died on March 15, 2008. But I got to prove that her 25 years of wholeheartedly supporting me weren’t in vain — you can bet that had a lot to do with my feelings about selling reddit.” [06:28]
• This whole post is a reminder that shit will happen and will wake me up when I’m feeling down and give me energy. [07:04]

Resources from this Episode:

• Keep Calm and Carry On: What You Didn’t Know About the Reddit Story by Alexis Ohanian

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Connect with Eric Siu:

• Growth Everywhere
• Single Grain
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