Perseverance Isn’t a Trait. It’s a Discipline.
The real test comes when everything stops working.
Steve Jobs once said: “Half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from non-successful ones is pure perseverance.”
Half? Try 80%. The other 20% is coffee.
But here’s the rub—business schools are allergic to perseverance. They’re designed for performance, not persistence. Students show up polished, coached, rehearsed. But the moment things stop working? Blank stares. Shrugged shoulders. Or worse, silence dressed up in a PowerPoint slide.
We’ve built an entire academic machine around success theatre. Tight deadlines, tidy rubrics, and superficial feedback loops that reward fast answers and shiny slides. But perseverance? That’s built in the mess. In the confusion. In the moment when your first idea flops, your teammate ghosts, and your prototype gets laughed out of a user test.
So I flip the script.
In every course I teach—whether it’s Lean Startup, Social Entrepreneurship, or Strategic Thinking—I engineer stuck moments.
I throw them into fieldwork before they feel ready.
I withhold instructions when they beg for templates.
I design deliverables they can’t finish on the first try.
Because grit isn’t taught. It’s triggered.
I want them frustrated. I want them doubting. And then I want them to push anyway. That’s when learning starts—not when they “ace” the rubric.
This isn’t about making things hard for the sake of it. I think it’s about building the muscle that actually matters. Because when they leave the classroom, no one’s handing them a syllabus. Just chaos, ambiguity, and maybe a Slack message at midnight.
And I’m not immune either. This semester, a cornerstone field trip—literally the backbone of the course—got cancelled five minutes before class. Total gut punch. The students were stunned, morale tanked, and I had about 30 seconds to either fold or flip the script. So I did what I ask them to do: I adapted. I scrapped the plan, rewired the afternoon in real time, and turned what should’ve been a disaster into a live exercise on ideation, observation, and behavioral mapping—giving them just enough for it to click when we finally got out the next day. Was it smooth? Nope. But it worked. Because perseverance isn’t something I preach from a podium—it’s something I practice in front of them. And when they watch me handle chaos without flinching (well, not too much), they start to realize: this is the job. This is the work.
So, yeah, perseverance is the difference. But it doesn’t show up on transcripts. It shows up on day 37 when everything sucks and you keep showing up anyway.
Business schools need to stop polishing resumes and start cultivating resilience. Because otherwise, we’re just producing case-study actors. And when the real script runs out, they fold.
And I’m not here for that play.