#BUt i know if he doesnt have some emotional moment where his humanity overcomes m*zan then we fucked

[keepingupwiththekamados]

Oh for fucks sake pls tell me this is a late april fools joke

#kny chapter 201 #kny spoilers #spoilers #IM FUCKI G #BAFFLED #ON ONE HAND IM GLAD #BUt i know if he doesnt have some emotional moment where his humanity overcomes m*zan then we fucked #my post #i dont know what to do!!! #should i be emo or should i be excited

[viralhottopics]

The Walking Dead guide to surviving as a new business

Image: Gene Page/AMC

[Editor’s note: Spoilers for The Walking dead throughout.]

Its bleak and we both know it the kind of soul-crushing downer that goes way beyond horror and into something more existential and emotionally haunting.

The twists are exciting, sure, but its not so much the unexpected that scares us; its the stuff we saw coming or (in retrospect) the stuff we should have seen coming. Theres happiness from time to time bright triumphs of human spirit and social ingenuity but if were honest, those moments, just like everything else, are short lived.

According to the Startup Genome Report, the survival rate for startups is a mere 10%. Put more starkly: 90% of all startups die within their first three years. (Oh, did you think we were talking about something else?)

As Robin Chase, co-founder of Zipcar and Veniam told Foundr Magazine: Startups are really hard. Every successful one had terrible hurdles and setbacks that they had to overcome. These challenges are the norm and not unique to you and your startup.

Its bloody, sweaty, tear-filled work but once youre hooked, good luck turning away.

The question is: What do startups have to do with a pop-culture phenomenon like The Walking Dead?

Turns out, everything.

In fact, there are at least four lessons everybodys favorite post-apocalyptic horror-scape can teach you about surviving as a startup. Here they are in all their unsettling glory.

Never fall into a coma (or get caught sleepin)

Image: AMC

Rick Grimes nightmare like most zombieland protagonists begins with a wake up. Hes alone, disoriented, and (as usual) oily. The world has changed, and not for the good.

The lesson here is obvious, but many startup founders still ignore it. Whether your niche is B2C, B2B, SaaS, or old-fashioned ecommerce doesnt really matter the world changes fast. Everyday a new technological evolution emerges: Drones, self-driving cars, holograms, dynamic online personalization, VR, AR, AI, and a host of other acronyms. And that doesnt even factor in trends in the wider culture.

Daniel Marlin from Entrepreneur and the Huffington Post puts it like this: The same rings true for the changing landscape of start-ups. Consumers evolve, corporate hierarchies adjust and sometimes cease to exist altogether in favour of a more dynamic structure.

The best way to stay awake is to combine two approaches. First, take advantage of social-listening and online alert tools to systematize paying attention, both to your industry and pop-culture trends. Barring this automated approach, new developments will inevitably fall through the cracks.

Second, regardless of your niche, service, or product, do whatever you can to move towards an agile workflow. First used in car manufacturing and then applied to technological development, agile prioritizes iterative testing, runs on tight feedback loops that include real users, and puts decision making in the hands of the people who are closest to the problem being solved.

In truth, these two steps are the only way to ensure you dont wake up to a future thats passed you by or one thats stalking your death.

Never hesitate to murder your darlings (even if its your mom)

Image: AMC

In a show full of heart-wrenching scenes, few stand out like the death of Lori Grimes. Matricide is a bold move for any plot, but immediately after giving birth well, brutal doesnt really do it justice.

And yet, however brutal it may have been, one of the keys to surviving The Walking Dead is to do whatevers necessary, when its necessary, sometimes to even those we hold most dear.

The same is true for startups.

Part of what fuels startups is the belief in an idea. Such belief is crucial when it comes to enduring the inevitable ups and downs that confront all founders. The trouble is that belief especially dogmatic, hard-headed, despite what everyone says I know its brilliant has a darkside you might not expect: Love.

When we come to love our ideas themselves, not the solutions they aim to offer, we become blind. We lost sight of what really matters: not products, not promotions, not methods outcomes. In his 1913-1914 Cambridge lectures, On the Art of Writing, Arthur Quiller-Couch was the first to coin the phrase murder your darlings, and Stephen King took it one step further, Kill your darlings, kill your darlings, even when it breaks your egocentric little scribbler’s heart, kill your darlings.

As hard as it is to watch on the small screen, following that advice is even more difficult in the real world. Brittany Berger head of content and PR at Mention offers this advice as an antidote: You need to remember that you do not matter. Separating myself from my work has been key in helping me make decisions based on business instead of emotion.

Case in point, one of Brittanys darlings was Mentions weekly Twitter chat. As a social media startup, that makes perfect sense. The only problem was, it didnt deliver any bottomline results. Popularity can fuel our egos and certainly has a role to play in marketing and PR but if it doesnt deliver, its time to break out the machete.

37Signals founder Jason Fried nails this fundamental principle: Start getting into the habit of saying noeven to many of your best ideas. Use the power of no to get your priorities straight. You rarely regret saying no. But you often wind up regretting saying yes.

In other words, be ruthless with the ideas you love. The more you love them, the more dangerous they can become.

Never make a bad situation worse (and it can always get worse)

Image: AMC

As disturbing as Carl Grimes’s matricide was, Season 7s premiere The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be took it to a whole new level. After the long-awaited arrival of Negan, Abrahams folksie, profanity-laced wisdom was the first to fall victim to Lucielle.

Bad situation? Yes. But does it gets worse? Indeed.

In a fit of justified outrage, everybodys favorite unfortunate son, Daryl Dixon, rises up. He cant help himself, and we get it. Unfortunately all the righteous indignation in the world wont help when youre outnumbered and outgunned. Driven back to the gravel, we wait for the hammer or, more accurately, the bat to drop.

However, in lieu of Daryl, Glenn is the second to go (complete with some serious eye-bulging and character-breaking guilt for Daryl).

The lesson? No matter how bad a situation is, our tempers, resentments, fears, and especially our mouths can always make it far worse. Whats more, the stress levels inherent to startups makes this an even more pressing concern.

Lively discussion is one thing. And fostering a culture of disagreement is essential. But those two ingredients only take shape in the shadow of another: Safety. Combining two unlikely sources the first cast of Saturday Night Live and Google Charles Duhigg calls attention to the crying need of safety in successful organizations: [M]ost important, teams need psychological safety. To create psychological safety team leaders needed to model the right behaviors.

These behaviors include deceptively subtle habits like not interrupting team members, ensuring everyone has equal time to participate, and especially calling out intergroup conflicts and resolving them through open discussion. Notice that each is about what leaders dont say, biting their tongues and pushing back against their own knee-jerk reactions.

Its obvious you dont want to be a Negan-style leader, but the Daryls inside all of us are far more likely to make things go from bad to worse within a startup.

Never go in alone (ever)

Image: AMC

While the previous lessons all come from some specific high points in The Walking Dead, we could easily locate this one in every episode ever. Dodging zombies might get you out a sticky situation now and then, but finding food, fire, shelter, weapons, medicine, and transportation is not a single player sport. And that doesnt even include the threat that comes from other people.

Simply put: If you go in alone youre not coming out.

As with zombies, so with startups. Launching a successful product or service is just the first fight. You also have to develop sales, marketing, and public relations as well as run bookkeeping, accounting and finance. Theres funding, operations, hiring and firing, building and then maintaining QA on a website, customer service, and most daunting scaling. The list goes on and on and on.

In the words of Leonard Kim, one of Inc. Magazines top digital and youth marketers: If you’re thinking of doing a startup yourself, then you have absolutely no clue what you’re in store for. I’ve spent most my adult life doing startups and and if I can admit I don’t know how to do so many of these things, then it’s okay for you to do the same.

Admitting our ignorance doesnt just apply to teams, it also applies to partners. After getting burnt early on in his career by a bad choice, Mashable contributor Josh Steimle took a hardline and decided to go it alone in his own agency. As he explains: I struggled for the next 10 years, never really getting anywhere. Finally, in 2013 I relented and brought in a partner. A year later revenue was three times larger than it had ever been before because I invested in the right person that excelled where I couldnt.

More than just surviving

Of course, at the end of the day, you want your startup to do more than just outlast the 90% who dont make it. You also want to thrive.

How? By paying close attention to what might at first appear to be an unlikely source: The Walking Dead. First, stay awake to trends and innovations. Second, say no even to your most-loved ideas. Third, cultivate safety instead of making bad situations worse. And fourth, surround yourself with people who can address your own weakness.

Theres no denying its bloody, sweaty, tear-filled work. Robin Chase was right: Challenges are the norm. But if Maggie Rhee can bring new life into an all but dead world so can you.

Aaron Orendorff is the founder of iconiContent and a regular contributor at Entrepreneur, Lifehacker, Fast Company, Business Insider and more. Connect with him about content marketing (and bunnies) on Facebook or Twitter.

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