Start before you think you’re ready
austinkleon.com
austinkleon.com
I had no choice, I couldn't do anything but start a business, I was a failure as an employee because of how I looked at life and the process of building/creating. I was always at odds with my employers to make things work better. (I was told to work slower and less hard because I made others look bad sigh)
So what do you say to someone like me? I need to hear "you can do it" because even though I am inclined to do it anyways, it's still really hard to build your own business.
This kind of information is incredibly helpful (encouraging) for me in my situation at this point in time. For many others it's not good advice.
Welcome to the club! You are an entrepreneur. It is really hard. Depressingly so sometimes. You are on your own because you can do it!
Learn to sell. Learn what selling is. Find a problem you have. Solve it in a repeatable way. Sell the solution.
Talk to people. What are their problems?
Repeat. Build up multiple cash flows. Software. Real estate. Consulting. Find entrepreneurs near you. Team up.
You can do it. Many people way less capable than you are already have.
Find an existing solution. Solve it better. You don't have to be first. Just be better. You already are.
You can do it. I know you can. Be relentless in the face of overwhelming odds.
You can do it! I did. We did. Everyone you know will think you are crazy. You. Are. Not.
You are wonderful. You make the world a better place. Keep at it!
- With a goal of supporting your health and personal needs
- An exercise of your own judgement, where your decisions were based on your own huristics for evaluating reality?
When you looked at something and thought "this is, based on my genuine judgement, impossible" did you decide to do something else? Or did you say "I have strong evidence that this cannot possibly work, and I'm really sleep-deprived... but sleep is for the weak and impossible is nothing." and plow onwards relentlessly?
If the former: great!
If the latter: Thats the problem that I think DayDollar is talking about. It is a pattern that I fell into at MIT -- I took on more commitments than was possible to grow into with the skills I knew how to gain because "impossible is nothing". I was constantly drunk-with-fatigue. I looked for help learning how to write first drafts and got told "just do it!" so I spent hours digging my nails into my skin in front of a blank page. I didn't know how to "do it" but the answer was too obvious for anyone to believe me. I asked for help learning how to manage my time and manage writing. Instead, I got encouragement.
The problem with giving advice like "you can do it!" or "start before you think you're ready!" is not that it is wrong. The problem is that it does not assess the situation. Bad advice is a zero-argument function.
Good advice recognizes that you are the source of observations about your situation and gives you a tool to do that better. Good advice offers heuristics: fallible methods of solving a problem which rely on human judgement.
The author of this piece quotes author David McCullough:
> There comes a point where you just have to stop, and start writing.
Good advice would be a question to ask to guide someone to realize when they've hit that point.
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The comment below me by /u/throwaway35784 tells you to do a whole bunch of things and the only thing it asks you to observe about your current situation is "Find a problem you have."
Everything else that he says is advice that is often a good idea but depends on the situation.
"You can do it" is not advice per se, it's encouragement.
If I am already doing it, or I intend to, or I am trying to or failing, or I am about to quit or not start, "you can do it" helps me not lose hope. It's not technical or directional, it's uplifting. "Someone cares" can be enough to turn my day around when I am on the knife's edge of success and failure. Then I can do what I already know needs to be done. Thanks for your views on how to give good advice, I think they are quite useful.
I kind of feel to be in a bit of a similar predicament.
If you're up for it, my email is in my profile.
It comes down to risk tolerance. Some people can tolerate more risk and desire more automony. For me, I view my company as a combination of many dreams. I don't make all the decisions or come up with all of the ideas. I actually find encouraging autonomy and mastery, my employees are more productive and happier.
It also seems wrong to morally judge people for living a life they want to live. For too many people simply having a stable job is a dream.
I don't make any bones for or against a moral 'argument' in terms of other peoples lives, just a stalwart defense of my own and others like it. I don't think any boss gets far hobbling their employees in any capacity. I have a great respect for the work people do and getting in their way is a waste of everybody's time. For those that dream of a stable job I would encourage them to dream bigger, if they are focused on work and not on some social or personal journey in life.
If everybody was aiming at the same thing I did and valued the same things I did, then yeah they would be losers for copping out on what they want. But not everyone is me and I barely have an opinion beyond passing interest about people who live with different values and goals, but are happy to see them succeed. A rising tide lifts all boats.
This strategy has an actual MBA term--it's called the "fast follower".
Basically, the first guy proves the market and takes all the arrows. The second guy reaps the vast majority of the profit in the space.
It's why semiconductor companies are so stagnant, for example, and simply buy each other rather than generate genuinely new, interesting products.
--- Jake the Dog [1]
Maybe not exactly on-topic, but ever since I heard this quote it's been my mantra whenever I'm learning something new. For example I took a beginner's hip hop dancing class last night. A younger me would have been very embarrassed at how uncoordinated I was. That embarrassment probably would have kept me from going back to the class. That mantra helps me remember that it's natural to be bad at first, and you simply have to be at peace with the fact that you're going to suck for a while if you're ever going to actually build the skill.
I call it "embrace the suckiness". When faced with a problem that seems impossible because you lack so much knowledge you are just going to have to accept that you suck for a little while. You have to stay calm and break the problem down into smaller problems and start trying the most retarded things you can think of. Sure, you'll struggle. And yes, half of what you try is going to be worthless, but you're acquiring knowledge and understanding at every step. Eventually it'll all make sense. You have to stay confident that there's light at the end of the tunnel. Solving tough problems and learning new things is all about persistence.
I can't express how important this mindset is for me. It's so statisfying to know that I can handle any problem thrown at me and I won't freak out or me give up. I just keep sucking until I don't.
But yeah, you have to start somewhere.
Glad you aspire to be more like Jake the Dog.
I’ve also been thinking about this a lot lately as I play piano more consistently. When I first learn a song it’s agony. I’m straining my brain so hard to figure out a reasonable fingering. The first week or two (assuming practice every day) is likewise quite tough or draining. And then muscle memory kicks in and I’m amazed that I’m able to play the song faster than expected. I feel like this process is way more applicable to learning in general than I used to give it credit. For some reason piano just makes the entire process crystal clear.
I think it's beautiful that we'll never figure out exactly how learning works.
I know that sucking when you're new at something is expected and merely a step towards the goal, but that doesn't stop me from still feeling inadequate.
The knowing/feeling dichotomy is something I struggle a lot with, and I haven't quite found the solution to that yet.
And that's okay! It's part of it. Comfort yourself with other things while you do the difficult thing of leaning new skills. That's sort of the whole process of self improvement.
So there is advice advocating both, what to do?
I find that when you have an endeavor with several essential areas, example with a triathlon you need to swim bike and run to complete it. Similarly for a business you need a product-service and you need customers to sell it to etc. Then the best approach is to get your toe wet in each area to get a feel for what is involved. So a mistaken approach is to spend all your time building a product that you think is good enough before starting to talk to customers. You need parallel efforts so that you can determine the right ratio of effort in each area to succeed. In war you would prepare your army but you would also have a few guys harassing the enemy to feel them out...
This is the fallacy that keeps people locked in over preparing. The way past it is to identify less risky goals that are still aligned with that particular objective. So in war your objective is to learn the enemy's weaknesses. So you could try trading with them, to survey their defenses. Imagine the Vikings at Lindisfarne, they are not going to go in blind. They first build a trading relationship, selling fish, and as friends they can see how strong the Abbey is, how many monasterial guards there are, or when the collection trays are the most full etc. Very little risk right? Similarly with sales, where your risk is your reputation. Say, you can't afford to jeopardize it with your one big connection because you spent a decade building the relationship. Well then you go in asking for advice on your idea, something low risk, instead of trying to make a yes-no sale.
I feel like this would be a lot easier to explain by phone. My email is riazrizvi at gmail, if you want to set that up. I’m on Pacific Standard. Open invite to anyone.
- fast vs slow - big investment vs little - strong customer service vs Google-like "for the masses" customer service - focus on customers vs focus on employees
There are no silver bullets and no advice is always right.
But just talking it over can be useful, as opposed to diving in without even thinking.
I've experienced both of these extremes - days of refactoring that could've been avoided by a few extra hours thinking about the problem, and days of refactoring that could've been avoided entirely by shipping the product early and realizing it was a bad idea to begin with. I think the optimal approach is actually to sketch out a simple solution first, ship it with bugs and all to a group of small trusted testers (or even just use it yourself), and then reevaluate which parts of the product are actually useful. Then throw out the 80% that's of marginal utility and really think through how to implement the remaining 20% in a solid way that you can build upon. Repeat once you have that launched, building out additional features in the same way.
It's possible to outperform other laboratories by accomplishing both regardless.
Working harder AND smarter has its unforseen advantages.
"When I began, I thought that the way one should work was to do all the research and then write the book. In time I began to understand that it’s when you start writing that you really find out what you don’t know and need to know."
You do have to do some research; you don't charge into your project with no plan. But not only does trying to make the Most Bestest Completest Plan Ever end up being a form of procrastination (see all those folks who've spent years doing worldbuilding for their great epic fantasy novel but still can't tell you what the protagonist's character arc is, or possibly even who the protagonist is, period), it turns out that once you start actually working on the project you get a much, much better sense of what the plan needs to be. You figure out what to write in that part of your outline that says "subplot about Gail's past starts here". You start figuring out more about what the Thing your [Insert Thing] as a Service startup actually needs to insert and so on.
It was the same for the Musashi 68000 emulator [3]. Before I wrote this, I had no experience with emulation other than playing one of the Pac Man emulators in the 90s, and yet the first iteration outperformed the x86 assembler core in Mame by 15%, and thus replaced it in the next version.
6 months ago, I didn't have a CLUE how ieee754 floating point worked. Now I've developed a floating point compression algorithm [4], which is being used in Concise Binary Encoding [5], also something I've never tried before.
You absolutely should try diving into things before you know what you're getting into. Even if it doesn't turn out the way you wanted, you're in for one hell of a ride, and what you'll learn is priceless.
[1] https://github.com/kstenerud/KSCrash
[2] https://github.com/kstenerud/Crash-Manager
[3] https://github.com/kstenerud/musashi/
I spent way too much time deciding between Turkish, Russian or Japanese and trying to justify my decision with arbitrary metrics of usefulness.
In the end I went with Japanese as I had the most interest in the culture, but then ran into another phase of paralysis by analysis in determining the most efficient study methods.
Finally bought a "recommended" textbook, instead of endlessly searching for the perfect learning resource and just got to it
To those curious, I've settled on Duolingo just because I realized I should just choose something, and it's free.
[1] /r/Esperanto is about Esperanto the language, meta-commentary or learning, often discussed in English. /r/Esperante is any topic, where the content is in Esperanto.
I've only been doing the Duolingo course for a little more than a week, and while I have enough grammar to do some very basic sentences, I'm far from fluent.
OTHER people though, they know that, from where they are at now, they'll be past the "challenged" stage and be put into the "fear" response - overwhelmed, unable to make progress forward because the anxiety is crippling. The constant pushing from those who have been in the first group just makes the people in the second group feel worse.
We should all consider if we're delaying for good/effective/self-helping reasons, or if we're doing so for bad/ineffective/procrastination reasons, and then we should act appropriately.
And no one should shame anyone for their choices. Maybe the choice is wrong, maybe we're identifying ourselves as having the wrong quality of reasoning...but who would know better than ourselves?
Imposter Syndrome sucks - but the reality of it is no reason to cripple yourself by diving into situations you know you aren't ready for, and then flailing and validating the feelings you had.
Many, like myself, have been struck by this particular paralysis of analysis, stuck in a studious stupefaction of research and preparation, in part due to fear of failure and in part due to never feeling prepared enough. My particular case is of pursuing the Red Hat Certified System Administrator certification. I have yet to take the exam, but have put in a fair bit of time of study with books and with online resources (some of which were paid subscriptions, like LinuxAcademy). Of course, the stakes aren't extremely high - if I were to fail, I'd be out $400. Not a huge amount of money but not small change either. Needless to say, I still want to get the certification but have yet to motivate myself to commit to it. Suffice it to say, I'm one of those people that thrives and prospers under deadlines, whether said deadlines are artificial or are a true limitation on my window of preparation.
Unless I really trusted my boss I wouldn’t try this :(
I'm almost halfway through and realise I have no innate abilities in music. Fortunately the application of music is very broad and there are many kinds of composers, so I can still achieve my goal. Also taking a lot of personal analytics with DailyDiary.com that I can learn from once the project is over.
This month I said f*ck it and started to work on it again.