What I Learned Today 😒

Today I learned that there are two camps when it comes to business, and I'm torn over which I belong to. They both make some very good, sound points. And they both have their merits and their faults.

On one side you have the “positive thinking” camp. These guys teach that if you want to be successful, you have to truly believe in what you are doing and never let a negative thought enter your mind. In other words, never let failure enter your mind.

You have to think, behave, and live every day as if success is positively guaranteed.

On the other side you have the “lean startup-ers”. These guys teach that you should only do the least necessary until your venture proves itself a success.

Everything here is based on the MVP (minimum viable product). These guys are used to failing a lot. And, in fact, failure is a sign to some of them that they are doing something right.

Because they (maybe deep down) expect to fail, they don't want to expend any more energy than is absolutely necessary to get a product and its accompanying marketing plans/systems/staff etc. off the ground and “validated”.

Super smart advice, right?

Anyway, the point of this article is that both camps have extremely valuable things to teach us, but they are kind of at odds with each other.

Staying lean is a brilliant strategy. I practice it every day. It works to minimize loss at every turn and save your valuable time, skills, and possibly pain.

But you need positive thinking, too. You can't go into something you pour your heart and soul into with a mind focused on failure. Banishing negative thoughts will keep you sane through all the madness you'll encounter.

Is it possible to mix the two?

I think so, but I'm not quite sure which mix is the best. Everyday I put out the best work I can and believe in my idea because I believe deep down inside I'll make it.

But also everyday I minimize activities that bloat and slow down the process.

I had this business partner a few years ago who was obsessed with complication and bureaucracy. Probably not intentionally, but it was mind-numbingly frustrating.

Every single person we met at a conference or online had to be registered in this clunky CRM with multiple steps and infuriating alerts every day.

Every time we wanted to do the simplest task it required some kind of fancy software and hours upon hours of research and setup. Often times the softwares weren't exactly what we needed and we had to change to another after only a few days.

He insisted we get a fancy accounting software to keep track of income and expenses. But we have no sales, I would say. What are we “accounting”?

Accounting isn't fancy software. Accounting is simply keeping track of crap until you need it. A shoebox works fine. So does a free spreadsheet. And these tools take a fraction of the time to learn and work with.

I swear it seems like we did absolutely no valuable work on the product the first year. We spent months just shuffling data around. We failed eventually.

So my advice is this: believe in your business with all your heart, but adhere to a strict “lean” mentality with all your actions.

If you don't have at least $10k in sales, don't even think of accounting software. If you don't have at least 100 people on your mailing list don't touch complicated CRMs or email software. Keep the data somewhere easy and access it as needed.

Then, run like hell building your idea. Don't look back until its absolutely, positively necessary.

Simplicity will set you free.