Jeremiah Gardner likes to get deep. He is one of the very few qualified underwater cave explorers on the planet, and he applies the lessons in risk-taking he’s learned beneath the surface to help leaders navigate uncertainty and thrive in business. As an innovation strategist and bestselling author of The Lean Brand, Jeremiah has worked with companies like GE, Nike, and ING to evolve in ways that deliver real customer value, not just shiny “innovation theater.”
In this episode of How Success Happens, Jeremiah shares his “Gold Line” framework for moving forward boldly without losing your way. Plus, he explains why he believes learning fast matters more than failing fast. Listen in to find out how his death-defying cave dives can help you navigate the dark caves of entrepreneurship with confidence, so your personal success can take off in three, two, one!
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Three Key Insights
1. Listen to the “Wet Rocks” in Your Life
Jeremiah describes cave diving as “a bunch of wet rocks at the end of the day,” but also as an environment that “called to me” like a siren song. He spent over two years training just to make his first real cave dive, all because he couldn’t shake that pull toward what he calls an “illogical” passion. In business, he sees the same thing: the ideas that won’t leave you alone are often the ones worth building a life and company around, even if they don’t make sense on paper at first.
Takeaway: Pay attention to the pursuits that “call to you” and commit to serious training around them, even when they look like “just wet rocks” to everyone else.
2. Be Uncomfortably Narrow
When most founders think of “innovation,” they imagine a big lightbulb moment and a huge market, but Jeremiah defines innovation as “the discovery, delivery, and development of new value in the customer’s eyes.” That starts with getting “uncomfortably narrow” about who you serve and what specific pain you’re solving, just like Facebook starting with Harvard or Amazon starting as a Seattle bookseller. He reminds us that you don’t need 1,000 customers at the beginning: “You need one customer… and then if you can do that, you can get to two.”
Takeaway: Choose a painfully specific customer and problem, prove you can help one person first, and then earn the right to scale.
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3. Learn Fast Instead of Failing Fast
Jeremiah hates the phrase “fail fast” so much that he has a T-shirt that crosses out “fail” and replaces it with “learn.” In one corporate example, he helped a company stop sinking millions into products nobody wanted by flipping from a few big bets to many small experiments, starting with the riskiest assumptions: “Is there a customer and is there a need?” For him, innovation is as much a cost-saving function—killing bad ideas early—as it is a revenue engine, because “learning what doesn’t work is as valuable to us as learning what does work.”
Takeaway: List your riskiest assumptions, run small experiments to test them, and measure success by how quickly you learn, not how perfectly you execute.
Two Ways to Learn More
1. You can explore Jeremiah’s work, take his free “Get Clarity” snapshot, and learn about his Gold Line framework at jeremiahgardner.com and pick up his book The Lean Brand to dive deeper into how brand innovation can help you discover new value and create passionate customers.
2. Check out Entrepreneur.com’s featured article on navigating the unknown: How to Unlock Transformative Growth By Embracing Uncertainty.
One Question to Ponder
When was the last time you took a risk that legit scared you, and what did you learn from the experience?
Email your answer to howsuccesshappens@entrepreneur.com. Your response just might be read on a future episode!
About How Success Happens
Each episode of How Success Happens shares the inspiring, entertaining, and unexpected journeys that influential leaders in business, the arts, and sports traveled on their way to becoming household names. It’s a reminder that behind every big-time career, there is a person who persisted in the face of self-doubt, failure, and anything else that got thrown in their way.
Jeremiah Gardner likes to get deep. He is one of the very few qualified underwater cave explorers on the planet, and he applies the lessons in risk-taking he’s learned beneath the surface to help leaders navigate uncertainty and thrive in business. As an innovation strategist and bestselling author of The Lean Brand, Jeremiah has worked with companies like GE, Nike, and ING to evolve in ways that deliver real customer value, not just shiny “innovation theater.”
In this episode of How Success Happens, Jeremiah shares his “Gold Line” framework for moving forward boldly without losing your way. Plus, he explains why he believes learning fast matters more than failing fast. Listen in to find out how his death-defying cave dives can help you navigate the dark caves of entrepreneurship with confidence, so your personal success can take off in three, two, one!
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