Introduction
A tale of two stresses.

A tale of two stresses.

When we started The Do Lectures we had no website.

No reputation.

No experience of doing events.

Getting speakers was tough.

Selling tickets was hard.

The economics were poor.

But struggle is a teacher.

It has lessons.

It doesn’t want you to quit.

It wants you to learn.


Things didn’t get better overnight.

But something changed.

We started getting letters from previous attendees saying it had been life-changing.

They kept on coming.

I got another one this week.

Newspapers put us in lists of the top events in the world.

An influential blogger put us in the top ten most important organisations in the world.

The Lindy Effect is a theory that the older something is the more likely it is to be still around in the future.


We had used struggle years well.

We learnt.

A ton.

Now here we are.

In 2022, it will be 14 years since we said ‘Hey, let’s do an event.’

With Covid, this will be our first event in a couple of years.

There will be three years worth of demand and only one year’s worth of supply.

People’s desire to attend just grows.

The waitlist continues to get longer with each year.

The cowshed fits 100 people.

Some things are not for scaling.

As much as there is a different stress now of not being able to fit everyone in, I am glad we kept going.

If you are reading this and going through struggle, keep going.

The pain will leave when it is done teaching you.

David Hieatt
Author

David Hieatt

Bankrupt at 16. Thrown out of college at 18. Joined Saatchi + Saatchi at 21. Started howies in 1995. Sold it to Timberland. Left. Started The Do Lectures. Started Hiut Denim Co.

View Comments
Next Post

Teach your people to be lazy.

Previous Post

Energy alerts.