Nicolas ColeCo-Founder Ship 30 for 30, Premium Ghostwriting Academy

The Hardest Part Of Business Nobody Prepares You For #business

8 May 2026 · 1 min

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In this solo talk, Nicolas Cole explains that the toughest phase in entrepreneurship is the zero‑to‑one stage. He argues that newcomers mistakenly think they only need to learn a single new skill, but that skill actually comprises dozens—or even hundreds—of sub‑skills. Because entrepreneurs start with no momentum, building a “machine” that generates momentum is painful. Cole also shares a common mistake he’s made: once early momentum appears, people (including himself) are tempted to switch tactics, thinking the new approach will be better. He stresses that the right move is to keep doing the thing that’s already working and sustain it for a meaningful period before considering changes.

Chapters

The absolute hardest part of business is Zero to One. The reason it's so hard is because you walk into the journey thinking, "Oh, I just have to learn one new skill," and you don't realize that in that one skill there are like 100 subskills. And so it's painful because you are trying to build a machine with momentum. You have zero momentum and now you are trying to build momentum. What a lot of people do, and I've made this mistake more times than I'd care to admit, is once they start gaining momentum, they think, "Oh, this 'thing is working, I should go do something different.' And it's like, no, you just got the thing to work. You should just keep doing the thing that's working for a sustained period of time.