In this TED talk, comedian James Veitch answers emails offering wealth in gold. It’s pretty funny, a nice 10-minute break for a Friday.
I’m not happy with the ways this embeds on this blog, so if this doesn’t give you a good screen display in the resolution you want, then you might want to try it by clicking this link: TED talk James Veitch What Happens When You Answer Spam Emails.
Hey, younger people, are you really all okay with f*cking as a synonym for really? Seriously. Do we need a new dictionary?
I caught a great post on Medium the other day: Jon Westenberg’s Why Copying the Habits of Successful People Won’t Make You Successful.
Toward the end, he comes up with a brilliant highlight point (the illustration here):
In reality, there’s only one habit that you can emulate that will get your somewhere. Just one. Work f*cking hard.
Great point, and well written. Is his wording better than “work hard” or “work really hard?” Not to me. Do you like it better?
Yesterday I found the Facebook page for “I fucking love science.” Seriously. That’s the page name. Can’t you just love science? On the other hand, 23 million likes for that page. Sigh.
I guess it’s my problem. The old meaning sticks to the sides of my head when people use it this new way. But it’s ugly. Not different at all to how I’m stuck with knowing the original meaning and derivation of the verb “sucks,” which came from—ugh.
And, for that matter, the original meaning of the word sh*t, which conjures up the wrong thing, for me, when people go with the trendy “get sh*t done” or last decade’s “get your sh*t together.”
But this is humans and the way we work. Words change meaning. Isn’t that groovy?
All over the web, on Q&A sites, blog posts, and so on, in panels and conferences, and in the occasional book, know-it-all alleged experts are lying to young entrepreneurs about the value of education. They sprout clichés that are unrealistic, impractical, and that when taken to an extreme, are even tragic.
It is so not true, but sadly also so widely believed.
They say education is a waste of time. They say that a “real” entrepreneur skips school to do a startup now. You’re in high school and they tell you being an entrepreneur is a viable alternative to getting an education. You’re in college and they tell you to drop out. They’re tricking you.
That’s crap perpetuated by wishful thinking. Sure, starting a business sounds better to you than sitting in a classroom or doing homework. And, when studying bogs you down—as it does at some point for all of us—they tempt you with this lie you can turn to instead: “You don’t have to do this. You’ll just be an entrepreneur. Way more fun.”
Tragic? Yes. They throw you off track. Tragedy is what might have been, but isn’t because something—lies, maybe laziness (that’s what makes those lies work)—got in the way. I learned that in a classroom at college. They are like those beautiful sirens—mythological Greek ladies, sexy as hell, singing from the sidelines—who lured sailors off course and into the rocks.
But no, wait. You don’t have an education, so you have no idea what that reference is about. Unless you saw it in some low-grade movie.
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Don’t kid yourself: You get the education when you’re young because it makes your life better.
First, it means doing something hard, something that takes a few years, and that builds you up. You do homework, you take tests, you write papers. You lose sleep turning work in on time. You grow. You face challenges and overcome them. The best path goes uphill sometimes. You can’t always take the easy route; you’ll end up nowhere.
Second, you learn to think, digest information, communicate, discuss ideas, evaluate options, and make decisions. You acquire skills and mindsets that make you better.
Third, it’s about options. Ten and 20 years will go by really fast. If you have a degree, then you have options. You have more choices. If you don’t get an education, someday there will be a thirty-something-year-old person living in your body, cursing you.
And, by the way, study what you like doing. I majored in lit, then did journalism in grad school. Ten years later, I went to business school. I ended up a software entrepreneur, writing my own code in the beginning. Your business success—or lack of it—isn’t what you learned or didn’t learn in school. It’s who you are. Life is way better with an education, but it doesn’t have to be a business education. Your education is part of who you are. Business is fine if you want to study it, but if not, no sweat. You can still do your own business later.
Yes, there are an extremely rare few who have earned the right to scoff at education. Peter Thiel, for one; nobody can doubt his credentials. He’s not just another amateur expert reading what everybody else says. And yes, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and a few other rare exceptions. Each of them is one in several million. And all three of them were dragged out of education by one of the biggest deals of the last 100 years. Rumor has it that Jobs actually got the education by auditing—without getting the paperwork—at Reed College. And you won’t find either Gates or Zuckerberg claiming others should drop out. And you aren’t them. They are exceptions, not the rule.
Don’t risk real life betting on yourself as that one in a million. Give yourself options. Look at the odds.
In the real world—for the rest of us—actually starting a business takes seasoning first. You need some time. Work as an employee, keep your eyes open. The right time will come. It’s not one of those “now or never” situations until you pass 60 or so. Most of us need a decade or so in the work world, at least, before we’re ready to start our own business. I was 33 when I went out on my own, and 45 when it finally took off.
A few decades ago, before this craziness started, I took a course in entrepreneurship from Steve Brandt, at the Stanford Business School. Look him up on Amazon. It was a privilege I still appreciate.
Toward the end of the course, he paused, looked up at the lot of us, and said (something like): “Listen. I’m not saying you’re supposed to pass this class, graduate, and go start a business. That’s not realistic. You’re too young. You need more experience. So, if you’re serious about this, what you do now is choose the stream you want to swim in. Take a job in an area that interests you. Wait until you’re ready.”
A few decades later I was teaching entrepreneurship part-time, having built my own business, when one of my students asked me how he could set up a business in coffee roasting right out of school. He wasn’t the typical undergrad. He was married and in his middle twenties. I told him to work with a coffee roaster first. He did, for two or three years. Today, about 10 years later, he and his wife own a successful multi-location coffee roasting business called Back Porch Coffee in Bend, Oregon.
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Still, you want more?
If you do get that education, you’ll have a huge advantage over the uneducated in distinguishing data that matters from data that doesn’t. So you’ll realize I’m right. But for a quick data fix, check out what the Kauffman Foundation discovered when they analyzed 479 successful high-tech startups. Here’s what they say:
Before you swallow entrepreneurial advice from anybody, ask first whether they’ve ever built a business. And even then, don’t believe them; think about it, and decide for yourself.
Don’t believe me either. Look around you.
The best startup business idea for 2016 is one that matches your unique background, experience, and preferences with something that people need, want, and will pay for. It’s about you and your customers, not the idea. 
Stare at a mirror and think about who you are, your resources, what you like to do, what you know how to do, and what you do better than others. Combine that with where and how you can give value to customers. What you love to do matters, but connect that to something you can sell.
You don’t have to do something new or different; just do something well. Millions of new businesses are start up every month doing something that’s been done millions of times before, but better, differently, or with more focus, or in a different place.
Bad ideas make bad businesses, but good ideas are infinite. What matters isn’t the idea but doing the work and giving other people value that enough of them want to pay for.
What makes a kid a future entrepreneur or tech wizard? Of course that’s an impossible question, with a million answers and no consensus. And I’m not claiming any expertise beyond a lifetime as a tech entrepreneur and concerned parent (father of several successful entrepreneurs and tech wizards). 
But I do say that easy access to keyboards, computers and the right kind of video/online/tablet games are steps in the right direction. And good for kids.
Do you have kids in your house? Do you regulate their screen time?
I’d like you to take a second look at kids and computers. Not all screen time is the same thing. And I’m pretty sure the right kind of screen activities can be good for kids. I’m not suggesting that unlimited access to mobile devices, living on the smart phone, is good for anybody. But some kinds of games, and screen time connected to keyboards can be really good.
Not that all parents want their kids to be entrepreneurs or techies — nor should they. But some do, and for any kid in 2015, a comfortable relationship with technology is a good thing. High tech is not going away.
I draw from my experience first:
Aside from my experience, there is research. The American Psychological Association reviewed research on video games for an article in the February 2014 issue of its journal Monitor on Psychology. They found:
Last weekend I watched grandkids aged 7, 8 and 9 spend a couple of hours together, collaboratively, solving puzzles involved in a Lego-based game getting Lego-character super heroes through mazes and over obstacles. It reminded me of the real-time strategy and role-playing games of 20 years ago. It was good for them.
And then there’s Minecraft, in which kids create new worlds of structures and adventures using virtual block landscapes, managing resources and building virtual things. There are lots of other examples of good computer games, including some in which kids program robots, solving puzzles with programming sequence. Or consider Scratch, the programming language MIT developed for kids to play with.
So, yes, I agree with all of you generation X and millennial parents that you need to limit screen time in general, and particularly those mobile devices that end up replacing real life with non-stop txt messages, or endless cartoons and such. But don’t treat all screen time as the same. Differentiate between screen time with keyboards, programming and programming-like games, strategy and adventure games, and other potentially educational computing experiences.
Some “screen time” is good for these kids in my opinion. And whether or not it encourages them to be future entrepreneurs, if it helps them develop the right kind of familiarity with technology, it can’t be that bad.
(Note: this is an only slight modification of my latest column for the Eugene Register Guard, my local newspaper in Eugene, Oregon.) (Illustration: thanks to Donnie Rae, Flickr, creative commons)
Despite the common assumption that successful entrepreneurs have to be completely obsessed with their work, I think work-life balance is possible, even for people starting new businesses.
I don’t like the myth that the real entrepreneurs ignore everything else. In fact I know several very well. They work hard, but also get back to family for dinner time and bed time for the kids, get to parent-teacher conferences, watch some if not all the kids’ soccer games, help with homework, and take the occasional family vacations.
Here are some ways they do it:
And I do know people who deal with this well, some of whom are very well-known in startup circles. But I won’t mention names because this is very personal.
For the record, this comes up because of this question in Quora, and some of the answers to it.
(Image: Not mine; I picked it up from a Facebook post of a year ago. I apologize to whoever drew it originally. If I knew, I would give credit.)
“No battle plan ever survives first contact with the enemy.” – Helmuth von Moltke.
Similarly, all business ideas are brilliant before they are executed. Ideas have to run through an obstacle course of hard realities before they are really opportunities. Few ideas make it.
Everybody has ideas, Millions of business ideas are floating around everywhere. Every problem anybody encounters is a solution waiting to be unwrapped. Every time somebody follows the comment “there should be a better way” by suggesting a better way, that’s a business idea.
An opportunity is way more important than an idea.The difference between idea and opportunity is huge. An opportunity is an idea somebody can execute, An opportunity is an idea you can execute on because the technology and product development will succeed, people want to pay for it, there is a team with the capability to execute, the needed resources are available, and the economics will work. Ideas have no value because nobody owns them and there are billions floating around every day. Opportunities are the beginning of something that can gain value.
That idea you have, the one you think will make millions? If it’s any good at all, you’re not the only one to have it. You’re right now in a race with somebody else to execute on it. What’s more likely, however, is that it won’t make it through the gauntlet of execution. It’s really hard to get from idea to opportunity.
Why am I sharing this discouraging word?
So what do you do with an idea?
You gather a team, you develop early versions or minimum viable versions, prototypes, get on kickstarter, get traction, and so forth. You execute on the idea. And if you can’t find people who want to join you, get a clue.
(Image: courtesy of archiexpo.com)
I’m 18 years old and want to be a successful tech entrepreneur. What steps should I take?
That one, specifically, popped up in my email today from Quora, the excellent questions-and-answers site that I frequent often. But that’s just today. I saw a very similar question from a different person yesterday, and another on Monday. So that question, in various versions, has become one of those questions that pop up everywhere.
There is only one obvious answer that will be generally true for anybody your age that asks this question: focus on completing your education. Get yourself a college or university degree, the classic BA or BS.
Choose your course of study as if you knew you were going to die when you graduate. Whether it’s computer science, engineering, math, pure science, liberal arts, fine arts, or business, if it is what interests you and what you want to study, then that’s the right step to take. You’re young and the world is full of options. If you study what you want, you discover who you are. You are quite likely to change your mind once or twice after you start – most students do – but that’s also fine, it’s part of the normal course of education, you’re in a discovery phase.
Your education isn’t about specific business knowledge. It’s about clear thinking and communication. It’s about skills and understanding that apply to whatever else you do for the rest of your life. It is not easily measured by direct correlations to what entrepreneurs need to know or do. Yes, it is true that there are many parts of entrepreneurship that can’t be taught in a classroom. And it’s true that you can pick those up elsewhere. But it is also true that what you do learn as you get that degree is extremely important for your long-term career, and happiness; and will be directly applicable to what you have to do to be successful as an entrepreneur.
Entrepreneurship, business, and tech startups require a lot of common sense, a lot of clear thinking, a lot of hard work, and usually a significant dose of experience too. Studying some business topics can accelerate learning. Cash flow, for example, is a body of knowledge worth learning in a classroom. But all of these can be learned outside of the classroom too.
If you like data to go along with this, check out the Kauffmann Index of Entrepreneurial Activity. What you’ll find is that success seems to correlate mostly with having education and experience both. Successful entrepreneurs tend, on average, to be in their 40s and holders of one and often more than one advanced degrees. But dig deeper into degrees and you’ll find very little correlation between what they actually studied and their success. Look around you and you’ll find that the liberal arts people are as likely to be successful as the tech and science people. What matters most is the ability to bear down and do the work, and clear thinking, and sticking to goals.
Don’t get distracted by those studies that relate degrees or areas of study to future earning power. There’s no direct connection between what you study and what you earn for your lifetime. What happens in real life is that getting a higher education degree only happens for people who can stick to a goal for several years, get work done when they have to, follow through on assignments in time and as needed, and accomplish something. Of course what happens is that people who can do that end up being more successful because of what they learned how to do and the simple fact that they stuck to it long enough to finish with a degree; but it isn’t they they know something special that made them worth more money. It is that they worked more, smarter, and better.
Those amazing billionaires who dropped out of Harvard and Reed College, Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, and Steve Jobs, are about one in ten million. You aren’t them. In each case they were seriously engaged in getting an education when the big idea changed their lives, made them obsessive, and became the business history we now all know. Two facts are very important: 1.) there are ten million or so of the rest of us for every one of them; and 2.) they weren’t skipping steps or avoiding anything, they dove towards something. First they fell in love with the idea and the possibility of a specific business, then they dropped out. (Steve Jobs doesn’t quite fit that description, but then he didn’t quite drop out either; he hung around Reed College, auditing courses, and got his education before he started Apple. He just didn’t pay tuition so he didn’t get the formal certification of his education.)
I think there’s an interesting similarity between successful entrepreneurship and successful marriages. The people I know who end up as successful couples, married for decades, generally fell in love with each other first, then got married, and then continued learning and evolving over decades as they grew together and changed together. Similarly, with the great tech startup successes that I’m aware of, there was a spark as the key people fell in love with the idea, the mission, the way they were going to change the world. They had that burst of passion first, and then followed it for years with learning, evolution, and course corrections.
If your question were about how to develop and pursue this amazing thing you want to do that is going to change the world, I might give you a different answer. But face it, you’re like me, like most of us, you’re trying to figure out not how to get to some specific destination, but rather what direction to travel in, generally. You aren’t blessed with the actual spark of the entrepreneurial idea. Don’t worry, though, very few of us are.
So you get your education now because that gives you future options, skills, and experience sticking to something. You advance your possibilities and give your career a chance to develop.
For the record, my own career shows that I practiced exactly what I’m suggesting here. My advice is based on what I’ve seen work, in the real world, and is what I did myself.
TED talk by Josh Kaufman, author of The First 20 Hours: Mastering the Toughest Part of Learning Anything. This seems like a great way to start a new year. He notes the 10,000-hours idea made popular by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers (it takes 10,000 hours to be an expert); but point out that it has been misused and misunderstood.
According to Josh, the 10,000 hours is about true world-class expertise. It takes about 20 hours to get good enough to do something well enough to get through the “frustration barrier.” He uses playing the Ukulele as an example.
You can use this link to go to the source on Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY
I’m not sure I buy it. Particularly not the “anything” in learn anything. But it’s an interesting idea, and he uses an easy example.
In the last two weeks I’ve posted a three-part series on I’ve posted a series on setting and executing business strategy on the Amex OPEN forum in the last two weeks. I’m happy to see the first of these showing up on top of the trending list there. Here’s a summary:
The post is How a Simple Story can Improve Your Business. Here’s the main idea:
It’s simple. Just imagine the story of somebody who has a problem or wants something, finds your business and buys from you. Pretend for a moment that you’re writing a story or talking to a friend about your company. Don’t sweat writing or editing, just make it a simple story you can tell. Go ahead, be creative and let go.
The second post in the series is Use Specific Goals to Get Your Business Ahead.
To develop your own useful milestones for your business strategy, think of how an artist squints to see the features of a landscape, and (metaphorically) squint as you look at where you want your business to go. Look for points along the way, moving in the right direction, that you can fix on.
The third post is Steer Your Business on a Steady Course.
The idea of steering applies to real business strategy management in the need for frequent small corrections. It’s hard to make daily details match the big strategy. Even with strategy in place, and milestones and metrics laid out, it still takes regular review and revisions to make sure the focus and priorities in the strategy flow down into the daily details.
To my mind, strategy without execution is useless; and good business planning is nine parts execution for every one part strategy. And execution means setting the goals and then managing them, day by day.
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