Comment by radarsat1
8 years ago
> The more you have been rewarded in life for being smart and knowing everything, the more you felt intelligent, the less chance you had of making a startup work. You just weren't able to admit all the things you didn't know.
I think there's something to this, but I want to present an alternative, which is that the more I know, the more I know what I don't know. And with regards to startups and business, the effect of this that I can observe is one of paralysis. I am scared to death of committing to any idea because I can see right away many of the unknowns, and I fear the unknown unknowns. After some education, I have enough history of thinking I know something and then discovering that I basically know nothing, that I am scared to ever say, well THIS is the idea that is going to work out, I'll put all my money and effort for the next 10 years into THIS because I am sure. Sadly, the more I know, the less sure I am about anything, and it makes me unwilling to take risks. Not just business -- even deciding what to study next, what jobs to apply to, or what side project to begin -- every time I start something that seems simple enough, it takes about 5 minutes to realize I have no idea what I'm doing and have to evaluate whether it's worth pouring more time into. Result: things don't get done. Because there is no done. I do learn a lot however. But for what? Personal growth I guess. But I have no idea what to do with it. I really envy those people who are able to decide they are going to solve a specific problem, that it's worth it to do so, and are able to see it through to the end, instead of learning everything they can about it, getting bored, and moving on, which seems to be my pattern. In the end, for me, it is the learning that is motivating, not the goal, and that has terrible consequences for what you describe. Perhaps "successful at startups" is not the only metric, but at least for that metric, it is maybe not good to take the "I'm going to learn everything about this before actually doing anything" approach.
There are risky risks, and there are affordable risks. One of the risky risks -- at main job, I am also very reluctant to commit to any new projects without emphasizing that I can not guarantee result but only effort up front first. Luckily, I often get managers to acknowledge my emphases on the effort part, which somehow reduces the risk of unknown unknowns. But I also had many occasions that I succeeded to convince managers or coworkers to alter their ambition with my emphases. In other word, my job has some room for risks and my finance has some room for risk of jobs, I guess I am lucky.
Now once the risk reduced to affordable level, my curiosity often takes over and I often gets excited to explore my unknowns.
It is sad that for some people that all they see is unaffordable risks and they have suppressed and forgotten their curiosity -- the source of life's excitement.
It definitely seems to me like older entrepreneurs concentrate on either providing a service to established industry or on craftsmanship, selling a luxury good to a slightly older crowd.
They are over “you can be anything you want to, Billy” and they have justifiable fears.
But if you ran your own deli for years and ended up building your own bagel slicing machine because nobody else had one or they mangled too many bagels, why not sleep in a little in the morning and sell bagel machines instead? You know your customer because you were your first customer. You can just ask the deli owner in your head what they would like.