Nobody Cares (2011)
bhorowitz.com
bhorowitz.com
I think people who just "get things done" are ones that possess this mindset, whether they know it or not. Instead of "I couldn't do X because of Y," they tend to say "I originally couldn't do X because of Y, but by doing Z I was able to make significant progress regardless."
I see this a lot, and have done it myself. You will frequently see someone with "better" technology than the leader or "the best" [insert thing] - but because they were too early, too late, didn't have enough PR, or the right connections etc... can't take market share and inevitably closes down.
I read a great quote from a rolling stone article, about Trump that I think is somewhat applicable to my point[1]:
Cheryl Donlon says she heard the tariff message loud and clear and she's fine with it, despite the fact that it clashes with traditional conservatism.
"We need someone who is just going to look at what's best for us," she says.
I mention that Trump's plan is virtually identical to Dick Gephardt's idea from way back in the 1988 Democratic presidential race, to fight the Korean Hyundai import wave with retaliatory tariffs.
Donlon says she didn't like that idea then.
Why not?
"I didn't like him," she says.
"Nobody" cared, about the Gephart's plan - and it even tanked him - but with the right spin and shine or however you want to put it, it sells.
[1] http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/how-america-made-d...
But then it turns and he's saying nobody cares about the story of why things are going wrong. That makes more sense.
http://www.businessinsider.com/steve-jobs-on-the-difference-...
Sometimes expectations are everything that matters. For example, elections. Turns out, you can get a Nobel Peace Prize, before you really do anything as president.
Excuses can be identified as anything said that has no consequence. And to anyone focused on only the consequences, not a single one of those words matter. They could be true, they could be false, it doesn't matter. Nobody cares, because nobody's listening.
An excuse is the very act of disowning a consequence, and those who are responsible for consequences, can never disown them. Anyone who recognizes this never has an excuse. They just fix things, which often can be done silently. Entrepreneurs, like coaches, have no excuses.
Excuses arise from the need to dodge responsibility. But the catch is, if you've got responsibilities you can dodge with excuses, you never were truly responsible for them anyway. You never had full ownership. If you give your boss an excuse that they are okay with, it either means the work didn't matter, or they had backup, aka, they expected you to fail. When a kid has a doctor's note that excused them from a field trip, it's okay, because the kid's presence doesn't matter that much. They just need a "good excuse". It's a true shame schools are so full of good excuses.
The true worthlessness of excuses can be demonstrated by the fact that anyone smart enough can come up with an infinite number of them. Allow lies, and you've got even more. If you ask nicely, in a bureaucracy, your boss may even come up with an excuse for you. Ya, "he's got your back." Except, that won't change the fact that you're all full of shit. And by shit I mean excuses.
But this has dire consequences beyond mere work. The same applies for excuses to be happy, and excuses to be sad, and for anything else. In other words, those who make a habit of making excuses can make an excuse for anything if they're smart enough. They will claim them all as "reasons" but the truth is, they're just doing whatever they want. A person that wants to be happy will have every excuse to, and vice versa. But excuses have no consequence. That person was already happy to begin with! (and vice versa). You see happy and depressed people with great excuses all the time. They're just happy or depressed. And if you need an excuse to be kind, you're an asshole already.
As a business owner, and as a parent, there will be no excuses. Instead, tell me how you could have not failed. Better yet, implement something that will prevent it from ever happening again. And that's what everyone cares about.
From the article, the coach made an excuse because he was expecting to be blamed. Instead, he was only expected to do the best he could given the circumstances. No one cared about his excuses because no one was wasting time blaming him.
But of course, in the Horowitz's world only investors and entrepreneurs matter, not the little people. They're not part of the game. They are literally nobody.
Your customers don't care. Customers don't care that you only have two engineers. Customers don't care how little time you had. Customers don't care how you did so much with so little. Customers don't care that you're losing money every month. Customer's don't even care why you made a decision that negatively impacted them. Customers don't care about you. They care about the end result in their hands and nothing else.
Bens Blog says: "When things go wrong in your company, your employees don't care... Nobody cares." Sounds like a false statement. Employees are not customers, they have a stake and interest in healthy operation of the business. If they don't, then the company culture must be crap.
Looking closely at reasons for failure is about learning lessons and avoiding similar trouble in future. At the last two companies I worked for, there was a constant drive and focus on "moving forward" - literally that phrase would pop up in emails and meetings, and too frequently the same mistakes would be repeated.
And that's true, if my company stops giving me a paycheck, I will be gone very quickly. No reason to stay around that kind of company. I doubt you are much different.
This as true for a CEO as it is for an entry-level employee. If you don't hit your deadline, your manager doesn't want to hear excuses. That doesn't solve their problem. They want to hear how you're going to fix it.
"Nobody cares why X happened" is to avoid learning a lesson.
Now, maybe you learned something from your failure, in which case you have another chance.
Comparing real life with Star Wars got way out of hand years ago.
"The Hero's journey - is what we're living!"... Yep. Okay. Good luck with that. Me, I'm stuck on "tempted by the dark side" and kinda liking it there to be honest.
Maybe I'm late, maybe the deadline was wrong.
I suppose you don't know the typical enterprise-y management style.
Better to devote all of your energy to doing better. Even if you still fail, you'll fail no worse and probably a fair bit better if you stay focused on the work rather than the excuses.
This is much easier said than done.
The better truth is "reality doesn't care." When deciding how to act, the reason you got to where you are is irrelevant. Reality doesn't care about fairness or justification. It just is. You can only move on from where you are, so focus on that.
Fundamentally you have an objective (win games, get more clients, raise money, whatever) and the things you can control to get that objective.
Once something moves out of the set of things you can control[0], no one cares about that thing even if they care about you reaching your objective. If a meeting with a client goes way south and they'll never talk to us again, that client is no longer in the set of things we control. It might suck, but the path to our goal of more revenue no longer includes them, so focus on getting the next client right.
I think you can apply this on an individual level. Sometimes it can be easy to get slowed down or even paralyzed by loss, regret, anxiety, etc. Our brains are wired such that it's easy to mistake wallowing in those feelings as doing something but it's really not. Energy is better spent on deciding what to do going forward instead of torturing yourself re-litigating the past.
[0] Really meaning controlling its impact on you. The fact that you can't control the weather does not mean that no one cares that you decided to send a boat out in a storm it's not suited to handle. No one cares that it's stormy, they care that you make the right decision not to send out a boat.
I'd say the second part of this isn't true in general. You'll often be judged by past success weather that's a good metric or not as long as it roughly fits the domain. The mentioned NFL is a great example of this. Coaches that have won stuff get better job offers. It may or may not be a good indicator but that's how it is. Similarly if you've worked for Google it'll probably be easier to land jobs elsewhere (I'd argue even if the reason for your departure is that you'd be considered a mishire in retrospect). In the domain of startups, if you've done one somewhat successfully funding gets a lot easier (which is a good advantage since you won't waste much time on it). A16Z are on record saying they'll fund people that have done startups before more liberally (in the Stanford video series).
#6: The World Only Cares About What It Can Get from You
2. You obviously missed the lesson of this story, which I won't repeat b/c other commentors here have done a great job explaining it. There is actually a valuable lesson to be learned that you can apply to your life to achieve better results. As an entrepreneur, when I came across this story a year ago in the book version, it was a huge insight and relief. I used to wallow in self pity about all the crap I had to suffer through, but after I read it, I stopped worrying about those silly things and just focused instead on executing. It's a night and day mental shift and it has not only massively reduced my stress level, but also resulted in better performance.