Don’t you hate it when you think of something clever to say, but forget to write it down? I do. My wife and I were having a discussion and I came up with some very clever statement of the form “if people do this, they don’t end up doing that”, but now I can’t remember it, so please enjoy this picture of a cat sending an email.
Just a moment. Just a moment.
“If you haven’t climbed a mountain before, thinking about what you’ll do when you get there is a distraction from starting the journey towards it. Climbing a mountain seems hard, but they’re only a few miles high, and perhaps ten times that wide; most of your journey towards it will be on the plain, and that deceptively level terrain is the hardest part. Speculating about what parka to wear on the upper slopes does nothing to get you walking towards that slope; set out on your journey, and you can buy a parka when you’re closer.”
This bit of armchair wisdom was designed to encapsulate why it’s better to start work on your business than it is to speculate on how to grow it into a multibillion-dollar conglomerate. Sure, it’s great to have a grand vision, but you don’t need to worry about mergers and acquisitions before you’ve found any customers – if you’ve never built a business before, that is.
If you are someone who has built many businesses, it’s okay to build on your experience to guide your steps – but most of us have not, and our grand dreams can actively get in the way of figuring out how to make your product, how to get it in front of your customers, and how to make your product excel in their eyes so that they choose you over the alternatives.
Phew. Strangely enough, that first image was load-bearing: I picked a “random” recent picture for this blog, but it so turned out that our cat had been playing with his catnip laptop right around the time that Sandi and I had been discussing strategies for startups.
Feed your memory with enough cues, sometimes you get a retrieval.
Cogsci out.
-the Centaur
Pictured: Loki, sending emails on his catnip laptop, and resting on his laurels after a hard day at work.
