Friday, 31 August 2018

Seth's Blog : The cereal entrepreneur

One of the biggest shifts of giving up a paycheck to start a new venture is the fact that you gave up a paycheck. Happiness is positive cash flow, and the easiest way to get there is to decrease your spending. An entrepreneur who is sleeping on a ...

The cereal entrepreneur

One of the biggest shifts of giving up a paycheck to start a new venture is the fact that you gave up a paycheck.

Happiness is positive cash flow, and the easiest way to get there is to decrease your spending.

An entrepreneur who is sleeping on a friend’s couch and eating corn flakes for breakfast, lunch and dinner is in far better emotional shape than the one who’s the primary support for a family of four in a fancy house in Scarsdale.

It’s tempting but difficult to raise money to pay yourself first… investors want to pay for for your organization’s assets and market presence, not your overhead.

And it’s difficult to make smart long-term decisions when your narrative of insufficiency is overwhelming.

The two tactics, then, go hand in hand:

  1. Cut your expenses to the bone before you need to. Every dollar not spent is a dollar you don’t need to raise. Eat cereal, not sushi. (This is the best reason to start a business when you’re in college).
  2. Find customers who will happily pay you in advance because your service or product is so useful that they can’t live without it. And if your service or product isn’t that useful, make it better.
  

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Thursday, 30 August 2018

Seth's Blog : After now

That's a recent idea. To imagine the world in twenty, fifty or a hundred years. Later than later. To consider the long-term impact of our actions. History as a concept is recent and thinking about the future is even more recent. Of course, future ...

After now

That’s a recent idea. To imagine the world in twenty, fifty or a hundred years. Later than later. To consider the long-term impact of our actions. History as a concept is recent and thinking about the future is even more recent.

Of course, future generations will be mature enough to think even further ahead. Either that or there won’t be future generations…

Many of the long-term forecasts we’re seeing today aren’t particularly rosy. But at least we’re having them, now, when we still have a chance to do something.

And yet, some of the long-term forecasts are rosier than we can even imagine. The leaps forward in medicine, energy production and AI are transforming our world even as we live in it.

When you’re just a little kid, the idea of thinking about “when I grow up” is mostly an ill-formed fantasy. And of course, a teenager simply lives for today, and perhaps the weekend.

Once you’ve made the choice to be a productive artist, though, someone who seeks to make an impact over time, time is either your friend or your opponent. Time is either something you use as a tool or something that works against you.

Part of the appeal of the Focus journal that I did with Moo is that it gives you leverage in your work to shift time. It doesn’t automatically give us long-term thinking, but it plants a seed, a seed that helps us realize that we’re on a journey, not simply at an event.

You currently work with people who will be productively working a hundred years from now. In fact, you might be one of those people. When I started posting these notes in 1992, I had no idea I’d be doing it 26 years later. And now I’m hoping that perhaps I’ll be doing it for at least another quarter century.

Drip, drip, drip.

Time doesn’t fly, not if you refuse to let it. But it does keep moving.

PS Ignore Sunk Costs, the latest episode of my podcast Akimbo, is out now.

  

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Wednesday, 29 August 2018

Seth's Blog : Ignore the questions

It doesn't matter what the questions are, really. They're a prompt. When you're in a job interview, a podcast interview, a sales call, a meeting… if we take the approach that this is a test and there's a right answer, we're not actually engaging and ...

Ignore the questions

It doesn’t matter what the questions are, really. They’re a prompt.

When you’re in a job interview, a podcast interview, a sales call, a meeting… if we take the approach that this is a test and there’s a right answer, we’re not actually engaging and moving things forward.

Instead, considering using the question as a chance to see more deeply in what this interaction is for, where are you hoping to go? Focus on status roles, the creation and resolution of tension, and most of all, changing minds.

If you’re not working to change minds, why are you here again?

  

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