One of the first things you notice when you step into a locker room is the words.
Mantras, affirmations, and aphorisms are littered everywhere. They’re etched into the doorways, walls, and sometimes even the carpeting on the floors.
I go back and forth on whether the words actually matter.
The 5 Pillars
When I committed to play college lacrosse my sophomore year in high school, BU didn’t have a DI lacrosse team yet. By the time I got to college, we were just beginning our 3rd season in program history. That year, we got a new locker room.
Upon its completion, our coaches took five pillars they had chosen to define our program, and they placed them around the room. These are the words they chose:
Family
Compete
Accountability
Motor
Work Ethic
Some of the pillars, like family and work ethic, are staples in athletics. Others, like motor, require an explanation. My personal favorite is compete; the concept isn’t out of place, but the word is (it’s not an adjective)!
Part of me still chuckles at how poorly these go together (they don’t flow well, some are redundant, and some require explanation). In a word, they feel clunky. But worst of all, we never talked about them! They just lined the walls of our locker room.
In fact, we only talked about them one time my freshman year, and that was when a teammate joked that these words randomly appeared above our lockers, and the coaches never even acknowledged them. I still remember sitting with a few other teammates laughing at how ridiculous it was.
The words didn’t matter.
But here’s the funny thing: 3 years later during my senior year, all of us were talking about these words every day, multiple times a day.
Something changed, and it wasn’t the words.
Turning the Tide: Mantras Matter
I was recently talking to a Navy SEAL about culture, and he made a comment about how so many companies think culture is just about covering walls with quotes.
He used much more colorful language, but the takeaway is the same: people believe words bestow an aura of excellence over us.
They’re not pixie dust though. What matters is the commitment to them. And that commitment is demonstrated through actions.
With regards to the 5 Pillars, I think the clunkiness of the selection demonstrates how little the words really matter. Directionally they do (they need to be memorable and actually relevant), but the words themselves don’t need to be that special.
The important thing is whether or not the people in the locker room actually care about them.
We did my senior year. The simplified story is that my senior class started talking about the pillars every day. It seemed silly and forced at first, but over time the rest of the team bought into them, and began saying them unprompted.
Importantly, we weren’t just talking about them. We were using them to describe what we were doing — whether that was getting up at 5 am for conditioning and lifts, doing extra film and wall ball, or explaining the way we carried ourselves on and off the field. We had the same pillars as prior years, but we developed our own affinity for them, so much so that it felt like we developed a different dialect.
The pillars reinforced, guided, and amplified our actions, and the actions became the pixie dust. Not the other way around.
This is one of the many reasons why that season was so special. We ultimately fell short of winning the championship, but fast forward to last year, the freshman from my senior year fittingly led the team to its first championship in school history.
Our team once again won the regular season championship this year. And we’re gearing up for another great season at Nickerson Field.
Necessary But Insufficient
I think cultural intentionality is really important, perhaps to a fault. I'm one to romanticize these types of culture components, which is why I’m hesitant to say they're definitively useful. As that Navy SEAL said, creative quotes won't save your company. Execution does.
The words are necessary, but insufficient.
The words must be in service of that execution. They help clarify the meaning, act as a reminder, and establish a shared set of standards for everyone.
And you can tell if it’s working based on simple questions. Do the words reinforce your goals? Does everyone adhere to them? Does that language naturally emerge during conversations? Is this a shared cultural dialect?
My takeaway from college is that while the words generally matter (they need to be memorable, relevant, and aspirational), I don’t think they need to be that unique. I know I’m parroting what I wrote above, but it bears repeating. Ideally your words are special, but it’s not a requirement.
I can list all the traits and habits and philosophies that made him great, but the secret is in how they’re put together, and that’s unique to every individual. You can take every ingredient in Coca-Cola—they’re listed right on the can—and combine them in a thousand different ways, but you’ll never be able to replicate Coca-Cola, because it’s not about the ingredients, it’s about the formula for combining those ingredients. (Tim Grover, Winning)
The non-negotiable aspect of all this is figuring out what the number one priority is and then designing a system to attain it. As Ravi Gupta asks: what’s the most important thing?
For Amazon, it’s customer obsession. For my college lacrosse team, it was winning a championship. Pillars reinforce your commitment to the most important thing whatever it is. They help uncover the habits needed to get where you need to go. They align the team’s energy, and reinforce a set of standards.
“Language is how you give intention to your intuition and how you share your vision with others. Language is how you create a culture.” (Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality)
Writing it Down
Growing up my father told me about the importance of writing down the things you care about.
The power of putting something on paper is its permanence. It makes it real, you can’t hide from it. That’s something the signers of the Declaration of Independence intimately understood. Writing creates weight — gravity even. And like gravity, it pulls you in.
The strength of permanence can also be a challenge. Really smart people often talk about the challenge of putting down your culture on paper. It has a tendency to ossify its institution, because you’re tethered to what you wrote.
This is why I like these mantras. They’re not supposed to be exhaustive. You’re supposed to be selective about what you write down. You have to choose what you want to amplify, and that choice is a filtering mechanism for everything else you do.
If these mantras align with the most important thing, then you’re well served. But if the main thing changes, or if the words don’t support that mission, then by all means you should evolve what you’re championing.
Culture is how you coordinate at scale; it’s how massive companies try to move in the same direction.
Most companies choose values like “innovation” or “integrity.” That’s like saying: “breathing” is a core principle for winning the olympics. In some cases, some athletes probably need to manage their breath better! But if that’s the case then the mantra needs to be much more colorful. Bezos didn’t choose “customer service”, he chose “Earth’s more customer-centric company”.
Culture is created by actions, and codified with words. If you believe writing words down will stunt your actions, then avoid it. But from what I’ve seen, words ultimately do matter, because when you write things down people know what you stand for. They know what matters and they’re willing to work harder for it. You create a gravitational pull for other people that hold similar values. And the resulting process you create becomes upstream (and downstream) from these principles. It becomes a powerful feedback loop, especially when there’s a healthy mix of top down and bottoms up buy in. When the CEO and the entry level employee talk about the same values, everyone suddenly understands what the most important thing is.
Danny has always understood how language can build culture by making essential concepts easy to understand and to teach. He is brilliant at coining phrases around common experiences, potential pitfalls, and favorable outcomes. These were repeated, over and over, in emails, in pre-meal meetings, and between staff members at USHG.
“Constant, gentle pressure” was Danny’s version of the Japanese phrase kaizen, the idea that everyone in the organization should always be improving, getting a little better all the time.
“Athletic hospitality” meant always looking for a win, whether you were playing offense (making an already great experience even better) or defense (apologizing for and fixing an error).
“Be the swan” reminded us that all the guest should see was a gracefully curved neck and meticulous white feathers sailing across the pond’s surface—not the webbed feet, churning furiously below, driving the glide. (Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality)
I call these culturisms — they help you escape Dunbar’s limits and move together as a team.
The more colorful and tangible you make them, the more powerful they’ll be. One of my favorite examples comes from Twilio cofounder and CEO Jeff Lawson:
“Here at Twilio, we are laser-focused on our customers’ success. We take the idea of wearing our customers’ shoes so seriously that some of these shoes hang from the walls of our office to remind us of this commitment.”
In the same way that you should be disciplined with an info diet, you should also be selective about what you repeat every day. You need statements dense with meaning. We create that meaning through our individual, and collective actions.
Find the words that work for you. Brainstorm and explore, then identify and select. Revisit them daily and remind yourself what they mean. And live by them.
This intentionality eventually pervades everything you do. People (and their actions) matter more than the words, but the words carry weight. In that vein I wanted to share new ones I’m living my life by.
Making New Mantras
Shortly after starting this job, I decided to make a new set of pillars — ones that would guide me during this new chapter of life.
Much of what I’ve written above informed how I decided to approach this. I knew I needed mantras that captured my newfound responsibility, sustained the drive for excellence, and grounded me with what matters most.
As I was deciding what to choose, I revisited a passage my partner Katherine wrote:
The actual job of venture is supporting people doing something far harder than you, whom history will rightfully remember long after you are forgotten. This realization usually comes later for investors, that we are bit players despite our objections. But how wiser and more beautiful one’s rise will be if we’re focused on supporting the heroes from behind the curtain. If we know that this whole thing wasn’t ever really about history or the future but the urgent, unrelenting present.
Put more simply: The founder is doing God’s work, not you.
I work with truly incredible people both in and outside our firm — all of them are far more accomplished than me, and many have built, or are building, truly incredible companies. This quote forces you to remember that contrary to what many investors say, they’re not the man (or woman) in the arena. The founders are.
And with that in mind, here’s how I’m seeking to support them.
GG's Pillars:
-Be the bar
-Become a plus one
-Ensure you’re the dumb one
-Remember who the Heroes are
-Believe before others understand
So far, these pillars haven’t changed — even after one year. I’m sure they will evolve at some point. But even if they do, that excerpt above will always be the foundation.
People like to say venture capital is filled with long feedback loops. That’s obviously true for your track record, but in many ways that’s a trailing indicator of something far more important that’s immediately within your control: your reputation. And that’s not earned in decades, it’s earned in seconds.
How we comport ourselves is our own prerogative. Everyone has their own approach.
Mine starts with founders. And those are the words I choose to live by.