After reading biographies of Elon Musk, Reed Hastings, Andy Grove, the PayPal Mafia, and a dozen other founders, I keep looking for the one piece of advice that ties them all together. The one insight that, if you only got to hear one thing, would be worth more than all the others combined.

It is not “move fast and break things.” It is not “hire slow, fire fast.” It is not even “build something people want.”

It is: just keep going.

Musk’s third rocket exploded and he had material for one more. He kept going. Netflix lost 800,000 subscribers after the Qwikster disaster. They kept going. Andy Grove watched Intel’s memory chip business die and pivoted the entire company to microprocessors. He kept going.

The pattern is so consistent across every founder story I have covered on this site that I am starting to think it is not a pattern at all. It is the entire thing. Everything else — the vision, the talent density, the first-principles thinking, the culture decks — is secondary to the simple, brutal willingness to keep going when every rational signal says to stop.

I do not mean this in a motivational-poster way. I mean it in a practical, unsexy, Tuesday-afternoon way. The difference between Blockbuster and Netflix was not that Netflix had a better strategy. It was that Netflix kept iterating on its strategy while Blockbuster froze.

The next time someone asks me for business advice, I am going to say three words and then stop talking.