You try a lot of things and you don’t know what the hell you’re doing. If you’re actually inventing something you shouldn’t know what you’re doing.
So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.
It’s about doing things that you haven’t done before, where you’re still kind of a beginner, and not resting on your laurels.
It’s the building of things that makes you happy. You have to enjoy the process whether you succeed or fail.
Failure is part of discovering the problem you need to be working on. If, as an entrepreneur, you are afraid to fail or to admit the failure of your efforts, then you completely lose any chance at being able to adapt and succeed at finding the problem that needs solving.
A lot is gained through experience, but experience teaches some and not others. Effectiveness and excellence, whether or not they were attained by simply having the knack or through the school of hard knocks, is really what you want to reward.
If the business were a play, Act One is: Woohoo, bright and bushy-tailed. We’re going to make something great! Act Two is: We’re six months behind on back-end development. We’re trying to raise venture capital. We’re trying to figure out what furniture we should sell to make payroll.
We don’t have meetings unless absolutely necessary.
No successful company has had ever been the product of just one person.