Employee to Entrepreneur by Steve Glaveski

Author:Steve Glaveski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2017-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

On procrastination

If you’re struggling to do that something you keep putting off, my best advice is just to start. If it’s writing, aim to do the bare minimum — ‘just a crappy 200 words a day’. You’ll find that the act of writing just 200 words makes getting into the zone and writing the subsequent 2000 so much easier.

Regularly doing at least the bare minimum, in whatever challenge you set yourself, delivers a small sense of achievement and a hit of serotonin. Getting up and going to the gym is the hard bit — once you’re there, it’s much easier! Signing up to that online course you’ve been putting off or watching a lecture seems onerous, until you hit the play button, hear a couple of interesting ideas, and get hooked. Heck, even going out for a carefree night on the town with friends can sometimes seem like an effort when your butt is parked in the comfort of your living room!

When I sat down to write this book, the last thing I wanted to be thinking was, ‘Oh shit, I need to write 75 000 words’. No, in the spirit of Homer Simpson, I think, ‘Okay brain, I’m just asking for a crappy 200 words, let’s do this and we can get back to drinking Laphroaig whisky, riding motorcycles and listening to podcasts’. Sure enough, I’ve tricked the brain into giving me a few thousand words by the end of the session.

Remember, it’s okay to fail, so long as you fail small, learn and survive to fight, and improve another day. A $50 000 failure, where you’ve effectively wasted your life savings on building an app without having done any testing — and had it fall flat the day you exposed it to the big bad world — must be avoided at all costs. A $50 failure, testing one of your problem statements using, say, Facebook ads, is a very cheap way to learn.

Today you can test your idea for a few hundred dollars, often at virtually no cost (more on that in chapter 8). Yet so many ‘wantrapreneurs’ still engage web or app development agencies to build an untested concept for $50 000 or more, assuming they have all the pieces of the puzzle in place. Shortly thereafter they go out of ‘business’ (it’s only a business if it makes money), having failed big financially and collected some emotional baggage, and they never recover to try again.

In the next couple of chapters, we’ll deep dive into the how underpinning the modern startup.

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