One of Jack Dorsey’s key points, paraphrased:
Draw out your ideas, share it immediately, and get instant feedback on what works and what don’t. If it’s not working, then shelve it. Some elements of it might pop up later. How do you quickly move from idea –> drawing –> prototype –> to a position where you can say, “this is what I want to spend my life doing”. Or “something I want to put away for now so that I can draw out the next idea.”
Just 16 mins!
I feel really compelled to write this, because I honestly hope I never forget this. Hence the reason why I’m filing this under my ‘things to remind myself’ tag. I’ve been learning a lot about people behavior, and even if this is a generally accepted/acknowledged view to you, putting this in writing helps me stand firm if I ever see myself falling into this trap by “writing it on the wall”.
For honest people, deceiving others is wrong. Yeah, but sometimes even the most honest people tell lies (but I’m talking about the big lies, not small ones). To deceive others, you have to first engage in self-deception. You deceive yourself that it’s ok to deceive others. Over time, with practice, it gets easier for honest people to hide the unacceptable parts of themselves, from themselves. If you find yourself glossing over aspects not aligned with your core values, and telling yourself that “everybody does this all the time, it’s not a big deal, life goes on”, then you know you are wrong and you need to stop immediately. Get professional help if you need to, because wrong is wrong, and honest people who take dishonest actions justifies it to themselves in whatever way that lets them still look at the mirror in the morning and not hate themselves – but they absolutely fail to realize that they’ve absolutely fell into “the deep end”.
So don’t fall into this slippery slope, if you start lying to yourself, it will only get easier over time. Don’t. Compromise.
A re-blog:
We procrastinate because we are afraid. We’re afraid it’s too much work and that it will drain us. We’re afraid we’ll screw it up and get in trouble. We’re afraid we don’t know how to do it. We’re afraid because, well, we’ve been putting it off forever and every time we put it off it seems a little more fearsome in our minds. That’s why not putting things off is so liberating. We’re forced to confront our fears, not let them grow bigger by repeatedly running away. And when we confront them, we find they’re not so scary after all.
Full post here.
A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),
“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.
And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.
Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.
In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,
Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?
A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.
Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.
What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World
VCs take a porfolio approach to managing risk; individual company is largely irrelevant because of diversification effects. In fact, one of my portfolio companies was once rejected by Sequoia because, “You’ll almost certainly build a nice $100 million business. But we’d rather have a riskier investment that either flames out or becomes a $1 billion business.” Thus the key metric is expected value.
Quotable quotes, from 21 Million Reasons For Mint To Sell via CloudAve.
I’ve blogged before about Vinod Khola’s video here (iinnovate’s interview), where in it he says one of the problems he notices in entrepreneurs is that they don’t dream big enough. Just recently Sarah Lacy wrote that the consensus of the recent TC50 panel is that nobody was “swinging for the fences“, everyone just playing it safe–basically dreaming small.
Sarah writes:
Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.
There are entrepreneurs somewhere building the next big companies. But it’s probably just a wonky side-project that no one—not even the entrepreneur himself—realizes is the next big thing. That’s who we need to drag on stage next year.
I agree, if it’s an obvious opportunity, someone’s already on it. We need more crazy people working on crazy ideas.
Vinod Khosla on problem solving: You don’t solve all problems before you jump into a new situation. You just believe in yourself, and say, “I’ll figure it out, one way or another”. Vinod had no idea how he was going to pay for fees and rent when he got accepted to the Stanford GSB. To me, this is the “leap of faith” advice entrepreneurs talk about. You just got to jump.
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