#12 - Is It Time To Push Or Pivot?

Before Leonardo da Vinci became one of history’s greatest artists, one of his earliest commissions looked and smelled like a complete disaster.

He locked himself inside a room filled with dead lizards, bats, snakes and insects while creating a monster for a painted shield. From the outside, the process looked strange, messy and impossible to understand. But Leonardo could already see how the pieces were supposed to come together.

In this episode, I break down what that story teaches us about building a successful business. Every entrepreneur, founder and creator eventually reaches an ugly stage where progress feels invisible, the work looks unfinished and the people around them start questioning the vision.

That does not always mean you are failing. Sometimes, it means you are still building something other people cannot see yet.

In this episode:

→ The strange story behind one of Leonardo da Vinci’s earliest commissions
→ Why the beginning of a successful business often looks like failure
→ How to keep working when nobody else understands the vision
→ Why sharing unfinished work too early can hurt your progress
→ When building in public helps—and when it becomes a distraction
→ How to choose the right people for honest business feedback
→ Why your closest circle may not recognize the value of your idea
→ How to survive the ugly stage of entrepreneurship without quitting

If your business, personal brand, podcast, startup or side hustle feels messy right now, don’t quit here. Keep working until the finished product can speak for itself.

ABOUT PERSONAL BETS

Person Bets is a podcast for the people actually running the business, not the investors, not the board, not the consultants on the sideline. Hosted by Chance Sweat, business broker at FitzGibbon Alexander, Inc. and founder of Sweat Equity Advisors. 

🔗 Personal Site: chancesweat.com
🔗 Brokerage Site: fitzgibbonalexander.com

🔗 Coaching Site: sweatequityadvisors.com
🔗 Follow Chance: @itschancesweat

Transcript

A Teen Genius And A Locked Door

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So picture this. Teenage kid alone in his room, the door's locked, and nobody's allowed in. Inside that room, a bunch of dead lizards. Some dead bats, dead snakes, crickets, butterflies, lotus. All of this rotting and going bad in the Italian heat. In fact, the smell is so bad that it's wafting outside into the alleys. Just walking in, you start to dry heave. You can't withstand it for more than a second. The kid doesn't notice it though. He hasn't eaten, hasn't slept in days. And he's been in there cutting up dead animals and reassembling the pieces into something that doesn't exist in nature. A true monster. The kid's name? Leonardo Da Vinci. Maybe you've heard of him. And this is the story of his first commission. Now, the person that hired him wasn't hiring the guy who painted the Mona Lisa. They were just hiring a teenage kid, someone that they thought could paint a shield. But it almost didn't happen because for weeks all he had to show for it, all he had in that room was the stench of death and a father who was starting to think that his son had lost his mind. Now stick with me because this story really isn't about the shield. It's about every single one of us who's ever started something, whether that be a business, a brand, a podcast, a company, or had to sit in the stench of what they were making before anyone else could see the vision.

The Shield Commission And The Plan

SPEAKER_00 1:29

Welcome back to the Personal Bets Podcast. My name is Chance Sweat. For those of you who don't know me, I am a business broker with Fitzgibbon Alexander here in Central Florida. I also own Sweat Equity Advisors, where a professional sales training and business advisory firm, helping small, main street, and middle market companies grow their sales teams and execute on their goals. I like to joke that I give business owners what they want. So here's the setup, and I'm pulling this from Gregorio Vesari, the guy who basically invented art history. He wrote biographies on the great Renaissance artists. And a few decades after he lived, and Leonardo is one of the best stories in the whole book, in my opinion. Now, Leonardo's father, Sir Piero, was a notary, essentially an attorney and a lawyer. They would draft up contracts in ancient Florence. And back at the family's country estate, a peasant who worked the land had carved a round shield out of a fig tree that he had cut down himself. Really rough, homemade, it wasn't anything special. And he asked Sir Piero for a favor, could he get someone in Florence to paint it for him? Now, Sir Piero didn't send it to some established master. He handed it to his own son, a teenage boy, an apprentice of the time in Andreo Del Ferrocchio's workshop. The best studio in the city, really. And no pressure, hey, just paint this thing and do a favor, right? They wanted a Medusa head. Now, Leonardo looked at the shield. It's warped, crude, really unfit for anything spectacular. So first he straightens it out over a fire and smooths it down, some basic prep work. Nobody's impressed yet. Then he decides what to paint. Not a coat of arms, not a nice little crest. He decides he's going to paint something that terrifies anyone who looks at it. The same effect as the head of Medusa, a monster so real that it stops you in your tracks. Myth says that a look at Medusa in the eyes would turn you to stone. Now, here where it gets a little bit strange.

Building A Monster From Real Parts

SPEAKER_00 3:33

To make the monster believable, Leonardo doesn't just sketch from his imagination. He feels like he has to truly build a monster, a dragon. He has to create something so lifelike to work from that his imagination just wasn't going to do its justice. Now, think about that. From Leonardo da Vinci, his imagination wasn't good enough. He needed to go out there and do something from real life. I love that. So he goes and collects real dead animals. Lizards, snakes, crickets, apparently bats, lots and lots of bats, locusts, butterflies, and he brings them into the private room where no one else is allowed to enter, not even his father, and he studies them. He dissects them. He combines parts from this animal with that animal into one impossible beast. Something that could breathe poison and had fire in its eyes and smoke pouring out of its nostrils, crawling out of a dark crack in the rock. And because these are real dead animals in a room for however many days or weeks it actually took him to do this, the smell became absolutely unbearable. Vasari's account says it plainly that the stench of the decaying animals was, quote, past bearing, end quote. But Leonardo didn't notice because of how much he loved the work that he was doing. He would sit in it, literally sit in it. Everything around in his room was dead and decaying, and he sat there. And you have to imagine that his father probably smelled it when he was walking past the door. The kid inside couldn't smell it at all because he was locked in on something nobody else could see yet. And I think that's the whole story right there. But it's it's actually

The Reveal That Makes Him Recoil

SPEAKER_00 5:20

not over. So eventually the shield is done. And by this point, nobody is even asking about it anymore. Not the peasant, not Sir Piero. The commission has gone quiet and probably written off as some weird boy playing with a bunch of dead animals, which I just don't understand how as a father you just get over that and you let it go. But I have to imagine that Leonardo was such a weird kid at this point that this probably seemed like nothing. So Leonardo tells his father, whenever you want it, come get it. And so Sir Piero shows up one morning, knocks on the door, Leonardo opens it, says, Hold on, wait a second, goes back inside, gets the shield up on an easel, puts it in good light, dims the window, so the light hits it just right. I mean, I've got four different lights on me right now just to make this podcast look right. And this guy's setting up a dead animal shield uh in his room. So anyway, he calls his father in, and when Sir Piero walks in expecting to see a shield, instead, for one full second, his brain tells him that there's a legit monster in the room. He the account is that he actually recoils and almost bolts out of his son's son's room. And that's the moment right there. The entire bet that Leonardo made was paying off in real time. A grown man, someone who should know that there's no such thing as monsters, uh really a sharp Florentine notary. I mean, this guy's an attorney for Christ's sakes, looks at the piece of wood and forgets that it's a piece of wood. He thinks there's a legitimate monster in his son's bedroom for a second. Now, Leonardo, more or less, this is exactly the effect that the work was made to produce. Take it, it's it's done exactly what it's supposed to do. And his father was so shaken and so impressed that he had quietly gone out, bought a completely different, forgettable shield with a heart pierced by an arrow, and gave that one to the peasant instead. The peasant never knew the difference. He got a shield, he was happy for the rest of his life, presumably, and Leonardo's actual shield, the monster, Sir Sir Pierre sold it to merchants in Florence for a hundred Ducats. Now, those merchants turned around and sold it to the Duke of Milan for 300. And this teenager side project, born out of a favor for the hired help, ended up in the hands of a Duke. The shield is lost to history now. Of course, it would have decayed and rotted and we wouldn't have got anything from it. I wish there was a sketch, uh, a legitimate sketch. There's a bunch of you know examples of it online, but

Why Early Versions Smell Bad

SPEAKER_00 7:40

nobody knows exactly where it ended up. But the story survived 500 plus years because it's not really a story about a shield. So this is why I wanted to tell you about this one. Every single person that I've ever talked to who's building something real, a buzz uh, you know, they're building a business, maybe they're writing a book on their experience, maybe they have their own brand. You know, the first version of anything, it really hits like the room with a bunch of dead animals in it. I've got a really good friend, him and his wife, wonderful full human beings. They've got a massive brand. And I don't want to spoil it because I hope he's gonna come on the podcast one day. They're just so busy. Um, but their first business adventure wasn't anything crazy. It honestly, to me at the time, I think I even joked with him. I was like, really? This is what you're gonna spend your time on. Um, which in hindsight now, I would I would never say that to an entrepreneur because you never know what idea is actually gonna hit and what that entrepreneur is gonna turn into. But anyway, back to the example. So the first version of anything usually hits like a dead animal in a closed room. The first version of this podcast, the first episode, Jimmy Hartley, great guest, great environment. But I would never work with the cameras before. So the entire time that Jimmy's telling me this great story about the culture and his family business, the camera's zooming in and out. That was week one, right? That was episode one. You know, there's months and years where it still smells like a dead animal, whatever you're building. So you're in there working on something, and from the outside, it just looks like rot. It smells bad, it's a terrible idea. Nobody's asking for updates anymore because they've quietly written you off, to be quite frankly. Your spouse can smell the stench of whatever it is you're working on. Your old coworkers are kind of not even asking about it because you've gone off and done something weird off the deep end. And people are just walking past the door of your life wondering what happened to you. And you can't smell it. You're the only one in the room who can't smell it because you're the only one who's seen how the pieces are supposed to fit together. I think about this every time I talk to a founder, a business owner, a buyer who's three months into building something and it looks like nothing yet. I think about that a ton recently when I'm thinking about sweat equity advisors or putting out a podcast episode that gets 40 views. I think about it every time a business owner brings me a company to sell that looks from the outside like a mess, but then underneath I look at the real assets and this thing's a cash cow. It's a beautiful business. It might have some antiquated technology or maybe there's no real systems in place, but it's a good asset.

When To Build In Public

SPEAKER_00 10:10

The instinct, when it stinks, is to open the door, let people in early, explain yourself, justify the smell. You can do that. I actually really believe that building in public is a great exercise because you get early feedback, but I don't think you always have to. Leonardo didn't let his father into that room, not even once, not for a single day, while it was still coming together. He didn't ask for feedback on a half-finished monster. I mean, could you imagine if he did, his dad probably would have thrown it out. He waited until the light was just right and then the reveal would truly land for what he wanted it to be, and he opened the door on his terms. Now that's discipline that most people just don't have. People crack the door a little too early, let somebody catch a whiff of the mess, and that person's reaction, a wrinkled nose, if you will, uh, huh, that's an interesting podcast concept, talks them out of finishing it. I mean, could you imagine if I let someone talk me out of getting my real estate license before I got laid off from my corporate job? I would have been months behind in becoming a business broker. I would have missed out on one of the biggest deals and commission checks I ever got in my entire life. I I may have gone back to corporate America because I would have been worried about my financial runway. You never know. Sometimes you got to let people in, your most trusted advisors, other artists, if you will, other business owners who can give you true critical advice, but not someone who's going to talk you out of trying to run down your dream. So what am I saying all this for? If you're building something right now, a company, a brand, you've got a side hustle going, you're building a YouTube channel while you still have a full-time job.

Three Rules For The Smelly Room

SPEAKER_00 11:45

Heck, if you're starting out fresh in your marriage, honestly, take three things from this story. One, the stench, quote unquote, is not a signal that you're failing. It's a signal that you're the only one close enough to see the shape of the thing that you're putting together. Everyone judging the smell, standing outside the room, questioning what you're doing, they don't have the picture that you have. Two, don't reveal it too early. And you don't owe the world a progress report on a half-finished monster that you're building, right? Control the reveal, set the lighting, let the work speak once it's ready, not 50 times while it's still ugly. Now, here's the caveat 2.1, if you will. Sometimes it's worth building in public because you can build anticipation and excitement. And you gotta be specific about how you do that. Don't show everyone everything. Build to the climactic reveal, give them pieces of it. Now, there's great entrepreneurs out there, influencers on Instagram, YouTube, where you see them doing every step of their business and they invite you along the journey. And so if you're inviting someone along a journey with you, then maybe you can give them a little bit, but don't give them everything. Number three, the value of the work was never up for debate for the people who get who are closest to it. The peasant didn't care, he just wanted a shield. Sir Piero almost missed what he had, and it took the the work excel, the work itself, a finish properly lit, staring back at him, what he thought was a real monster for a second in his son's bedroom, to change his mind. Your close circle is not always going to be your best judge. Sometimes it takes the finished thing in front of the right eyes to 3x, 10x, 100x, whatever multiple it is you think it could be possible, the value nobody around you can see while you're the one building it. Now, Da Vinci was a teenager doing a favor for his dad's hired help, and he still refused to phone it in. He still went and found real lizards, real bats, and sat in a room that smelled like death because he was building something that would actually scare people, not something that would just be good enough. And that's the bet that he took. So you need to take that same bet. Do the work when nobody's watching in the room, in the situation that totally stinks until the day you get to open the door on your own terms. Capish. Now that's

Keep Going And Share It

SPEAKER_00 14:10

the episode. If you're in the smelly room right now building, good. That means you're close to something that is going to be what you wanted it to be. Keep going, keep working. This has been personal bad. Subscribe, share it with somebody who's mid-build and needs to hear it.