Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.
Key Takeaways
- Recognition feels satisfying until it becomes the only measure of whether a win counts.
- Founders are prone to keep arguing with old critics long after customers have already answered the question and proved the critics wrong.
- Ambition is useful, but building your life around someone else’s approval is expensive.
In the 1880s, Gustave Eiffel was already one of France’s best-known engineers.
He had built railway bridges, viaducts, stations and other large iron structures across Europe. His company had developed a reputation for doing things that seemed difficult, expensive or slightly mad, then finding a way to make them work.
Then, Eiffel took on his most ambitious project yet. For the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, he proposed a 300-meter iron tower that would rise above the city. At the time, it would be the tallest man-made structure in the world.
Paris was not impressed.
In February 1887, while construction was already underway, around 40 prominent artists and writers published an open letter condemning the project. Charles Garnier, the architect behind the Paris Opera, had signed it. So had Guy de Maupassant, one of France’s most famous writers at the time, a major figure in French literature.
They believed Eiffel’s tower would disfigure Paris.
Eiffel defended the structure, arguing that its shape came from the engineering required to withstand the wind, and he carried on building. A little over two years later, the tower was finished.
When the World’s Fair opened, nearly two million visitors came before the fair closed. Paris had given Eiffel its answer: It was a hit! Eiffel was vindicated!
You might think that would have been enough. It wasn’t.
The more interesting part of Eiffel’s story came afterwards, when the argument should have been over.
Paris gave Eiffel his answer
By the end of the fair, the protests had lost steam because Eiffel had a result that no newspaper argument could match: People were paying to climb the tower.
But the tower still had a problem — it wasn’t guaranteed to be permanent.
Eiffel had received a 20-year concession. Under the agreement, the tower would pass to the City of Paris on January 1, 1910, so in his mind, the question had changed — he no longer needed to persuade people that the tower could be built; he needed to persuade the city that it deserved to remain.
So he kept finding reasons for it to exist. Even though it was already proven to be successful, Eiffel felt as if it wasn’t, and kept looking for ways to justify it.
From its first year, he used the tower for scientific experiments. Meteorologists worked there. Scientists studied gravity and air resistance. Eiffel built a laboratory and later a wind tunnel.
Then, radio gave him an even stronger argument.
In 1898, the tower was used for wireless telegraphy tests between the tower and the Panthéon, four kilometers away. In 1903, Eiffel supported military wireless experiments and helped finance part of the necessary installations, so the tower had a military communications role.
On January 1, 1910, the City of Paris renewed Eiffel’s concession, and the tower survived.
That part of the story is usually told as a triumph of engineering, but I think there’s another business lesson in it.
The critic you cannot stop thinking about
Most successful founders have a few people they’d like to prove wrong, and sometimes there’s a good reason.
But most other times, there will be:
- Someone who dismissed the company
- A former employer who said you’d never make it
- An investor who passed on the business and later watched it grow
So your company succeeds, and you might expect that to settle the matter, but ironically it often does not.
Business owners tend to check whether the naysayers have noticed. They wonder whether that person has changed their opinion, and every new award feels especially satisfying because the old critic might see it.
The business keeps growing, but part of the founder’s attention remains pointed backwards. This is where recognition gets tricky.
Wanting your work to be recognized is perfectly human. A business owner who spends years building a company wants customers to respect it, employees to believe in it and the market to understand what they have built.
The trouble starts when recognition becomes the receipt you need before you allow yourself to feel successful.
I have seen business owners reach milestones they once considered enormous and then spend very little time enjoying them because their attention goes almost immediately to the person who still does not seem impressed.
That person may even have no role in the business anymore and zero influence over the founder’s future, but still they occupy a surprising amount of mental space.
When the win needs an audience
There is a useful question I ask myself when I notice this tendency: If the person I am trying to impress never finds out, do I still want the achievement?
That’s how you separate ambition from approval.
If you want to build a larger company because you enjoy building it, carry on. If you want to win the client because the client matters to the business, go after it. If you want the award because it reflects work you are proud of, enjoy the award.
But if the achievement has started to feel incomplete because one particular person has not acknowledged it, that person may have become part of the goal without your noticing.
That is where the habit starts costing you. The critic has become a customer, and you keep supplying evidence. You produce another revenue milestone and then look for the next piece of proof.
They are satisfying for a while, but then you need another, and another.
Eiffel had a practical reason to keep making the case for his tower. Its future really was at stake. His scientific work helped give Paris a reason to keep it.
That’s why I won’t turn his story into a lesson about ignoring critics, because he gave the tower a purpose that outlasted the argument. The artists who hated it could keep hating it. The tower had become useful.
But for a founder, there is a difference between defending something that matters and chasing the approval of someone who no longer matters to the business.
You can spend years trying to make a critic change their mind, or you can put that energy into building something that makes their opinion less relevant. The first will become a lifetime project, but the second can become a business.
The Eiffel Tower is still in Paris. It’s a strange ending to a fight over whether something belonged in the city; today, we can’t imagine Paris without it.
It is also a useful reminder for anyone who has already achieved more than they once thought possible. You don’t need every person who doubted you to admit they were wrong.
At some point, the better question is whether you still want what you are building if they never do.
Key Takeaways
- Recognition feels satisfying until it becomes the only measure of whether a win counts.
- Founders are prone to keep arguing with old critics long after customers have already answered the question and proved the critics wrong.
- Ambition is useful, but building your life around someone else’s approval is expensive.
In the 1880s, Gustave Eiffel was already one of France’s best-known engineers.
He had built railway bridges, viaducts, stations and other large iron structures across Europe. His company had developed a reputation for doing things that seemed difficult, expensive or slightly mad, then finding a way to make them work.
Then, Eiffel took on his most ambitious project yet. For the 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, he proposed a 300-meter iron tower that would rise above the city. At the time, it would be the tallest man-made structure in the world.