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The romantic idea of creating something innovative and new can get us sidetracked quickly in entrepreneurship. There are 28 million small businesses in the United States as of this writing. You are competing with all those businesses, minds and offerings. The likelihood of being original is difficult against such staggering
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The temptation for businesses, especially after they have success, is to overreach. You have the choice of price, quality and service as your focal points in the marketplace. But you can only have two. We are tempted to be all three. But we live in a world of natural trade-offs.
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Entrepreneurs are heroes in our society. They fail for the rest of us. ~ Nassim Taleb Yes, entrepreneurs are indeed heroes. Ultimately, entrepreneurs are about initiative and responsibility for risk. However, at a fundamental level, entrepreneurs are problem solvers. They own the difficult problems others are reluctant to carry. There are
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This is your life. Stop making excuses. And practice every day. If you really want chaos to be a distant memory, then the only way out is competency (and then mastery) of a skill. If you really decided to improve your learning (and your life) you could find the time
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Are you doing what you are supposed to be doing? Is the work you have been doing for many years as relevant today, or are you having to unlearn and reinvent? I think that effort and working hard are relatively natural for many driven and successful people that I know.
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If you want to grow your business, you have to have good people to delegate functional work to. Otherwise, you become the bottleneck and risk making customers unhappy. Many years ago, I remember learning the lesson of delegation early while working an engineering project. I had a designer working on
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“It manifests itself in the shape of the lucky fool, defined as a person who benefited from a disproportionate share of luck but attributes his success to some other, generally very precise, reason.” – Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Fooled by Randomness If you haven't read Taleb's book, he
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Every handoff in your business is a failure point. When one person is handling information and moving execution to the next step, often you can get things done without many mistakes or delays. When you have to hand off a lead, support call, requirements, or project task, it's
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We can laugh at the paper shuffling reference as a bygone era, however, you would not be hard-pressed to see manual processes still being run today. Regardless of the efficiencies, cost-savings and better customer experience of digitization, old habits can die hard, especially in businesses. Never mind if your livelihood
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I can see why people often want someone to simply listen rather than give their opinion. The person with the problem knows more than you do about their situation. When you don't have skin in the game or know the nuances of a predicament, your advice can come
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I left a message for a company yesterday again. They have still not called me back. I am thinking about moving on. Too bad. There's a lot of business that could come their way. I tend to be a loyal person to the things I like. In this
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Pushing on your work takes an intense amount of energy. And without energy, it's hard to maintain consistency, perseverance and results. Energy is not a given. You have to foster your routines and habits to keep peak performance going. I like to hike, play tennis, trail run and