Would I want to relive IncentOne? Probably not. After all, sitting in the shower under freezing water for five minutes seemed easier than building IncentOne at times. Don’t get me wrong, we did fine but we could have done better. You can too.

As for the shower..

I did it for the first time by mistake. The cold shower. No not that kind. I was religious about daily workouts when I was building my company. My workouts were always hyper-intense and often my escape. It’s hard to worry about your technology vendor when you are sweating your ass off. I had just finished a workout and was taking a shower. I turned the water to all cold by mistake. It shocked me.

A thought crossed my mind. This is what it felt like running my company after the financial crash of the fall of 2008. I tried something. I wanted to see how much I could take. If I could stand in the freezing water without flinching, then nothing that came across my desk would seem tough. From that day on, I did it every day and every day I added some time under the freezing water. By January 2009, I was standing under the water for five minutes. I promised myself I would do that every day until we got the company back on its feet. Try it sometime. Like the rest of us crazy entrepreneurs, when I got it up to five minutes, I thought “can I spare that five minutes?”