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Book: The Tipping Point

// September 13th, 2009 // No Comments » // books

The Tipping Point
Malcolm Gladwell

ISBN-13: 978-0316010665

One of the best writings I have ever read. Incredible book by Malcolm Gladwell that sets a new high record on the number of Post-it Flags -> 61. This truly remarkable research outlines the mechanisms through which ideas propagate through society. Who are the key people, what are their characteristics, what are the characteristics of messages that succeed in spreading and what role does the environment play on the process.

Instead of giving a summary of the book, I am going to drop 3 breathtaking topics I encountered through this book, and I am going to let you buy and read the book to understand how they all connect:

THE CONNECTORS

• One of the most important type of people “with a particular and rare set of social gifts” for spreading an idea are the Connectors. When the 6 degrees of separation experiment was made, there was a side discovery – most of the letters went through the same people to reach the targets. “It means that a very small number of people are linked to everyone else in a few steps, and the rest of us are linked to the world through those special few.” What is interesting about those people is:
  • They value the weak tie, they send bday cards, they remember facts, write numbers
  • They know people from very different kinds of social circles and interests
  • They find something interesting in everyone they meet
• Did you know that roughly 56% of people find jobs through a personal connection, 18% through advertisement or agency and roughly 20% applied directly. Even more fascinating – most of those 56% happen through those weak ties that the connectors value so much, not through best friends.
• A gossip/news/message can cause an epidemics and tip to become extremely popular only when it reaches those Connectors, which then are able to spread it in bulk to other people and other Connectors.

THE POWER OF CONTEXT

• It turns out small changes in the environment can trigger huge behavioral changes, that we used believe were hard coded in the personality of a human. Behavior is function of social context.
• You don’t need to catch every criminal in New York City to stop crime in subway. History shows that all you have to do is clean the graffiti and stop the fare beating. This creates a friendlier atmosphere where people  are not predisposed to making a crime.
• This same theory is the reason why perfectly normal regular kids can become nasty guards if put into a simulated prison environment.
• Honesty isn’t a fundamental trait. It is considerably influenced by context. Kids that don’t usually cheat easily slip into cheating given a few simple incentives, and changes of environment. Kids tested number of times over period of time rarely give the same results in amount of cheating.
• So all of that means that you can tweak slightly the environment and cause people to behave in a different way.
• …and our brains are not good at calculating how powerful this concept of tweaking is.
• People work, live, interact best when they are in groups of 150. This way they have enough power to go through problems, and yet are personal and know each other’s skills  and abilities. It is an important environmental contextual characteristic.
• This is because people often create ‘joint memory’. The husband remembers some things, the wife others and thus when they get sync-ed over the years, all they have to know is who remembers what. This, on the other side, is one of the reasons why divorces are so painful – it is a bit like loosing part of yourself. Groups of 150 are still able to do efficient ‘joint memory’.
• Groups of 150 also have tremendous peer pressure, which is much more significant motivator than money. Companies should be run in teams of 150.

CIGARETS AND TIPPING POINT

• Preventing addiction:
  • People that smoke & are addicted to smoking are called smokers.
  • People that smoke (even up to a pack a day) but are NOT addicted are called chippers.
  • When kids (around 15) start smoking, it takes them 3 years to phase out from chippers to smokers.
  • The addiction is not achieved gradually, but rather at a tipping point, that is unique for each person, and is dependent on his genetic tolerance to nicotine.
  • Thus one way to prevent chippers to never become regular addicted smokers is to lower the nicotine in cigarettes so that even if they smoke a pack a day, they are not able to reach their nicotine addiction tipping point.
  • Breaking addiction:
    • Three brain chemicals known as neurotransmitters affect our happiness/depression state: serotonin, dopamine, and norepinephrine.
    • “Drugs like Zoloft and Prozac work because they prompt the brain to produce more serotonin: they compensate, in other words, for the deficit of serotonin that some depressed people suffer from. Nicotine appears to do exactly the same thing with the other two key neurotransmitters – dopamine and norepinephrine.”
    • Thus smokers in effect give themselves little shots of ‘happiness’ by smoking.
    • This is the key strategy – if you treat smokers for depression, you decrease their addiction to smoking and quitting becomes much less painful.
    • This was discovered by Glaxo Wellcome when they released anti-depressant Bupropion and people started reporting decreased desire to smoke. Today this medicine is marketed as Zyban to heavy smokers.

When I flip through the pages, jumping from bookmark to bookmark, I truly get lost in the sea of incredible discoveries of our simple, yet complex social behavior. I super highly recommend that you read this book, and also sit and think about how these concepts can be applied directly to achieve results in life.

Book: Purple Cow

// July 30th, 2009 // No Comments » // books

Purple Cow
Seth Godin

ISBN: 1-59184-021-x

After reading The Dip which I thought was brilliant, my high expectations for the Purple Cow were not met. Nevertheless it had a number of really good points to make. Here is my selection:

1. Seth Godin defines 3 eras: Before Advertising (think tv ads), During Advertising, and After Advertising. Then points out an obvious observation- Before tv advertisement, if you wanted to know who’s got the best cucumbers on the market, you would ask friend and they will tell you. During Advertising, companies that had money advertised, you watched tv and new already who’s got the ‘best’ product, so you already knew what to buy and didn’t have to ask. Now though we are in the After Advertising era when there are billion of ads, billion of products, and we have much less time than before to choose. So what does work if TV ads are ineffective? Answer is: your product has to be brilliant and original, so that it makes people talk about it and recommend it to friends, so that this way it can market itself.
2. How is this done? Well you have to build the marketing in the product. Don’t make a product, and burden the marketing team to figure out creative ways to sell it. Mix the marketing and engineering team so that the product itself is creative. Sounds very truthful to me.
3. “While ideaviruses [super successful popular products] are occasionally the result of luck (consider Macarena), the vast majority of product success stories are engineered from the first day to be successful.”
4. There was an example how one bank has online banking that is used only by 10% of it’s customers. The bank was considering closing down online banking, until it figure out those 10% own 70% of the banks deposits! Always know who the real valuable customers are. Those leading customers will be the attractive force to the masses. If any ads should be created, they should be targeted to this core target group.
   
5. I have a strong opinion about how pointless it is to go to school. I’ve written before about it, and this quote fits my vision so well:
   

   The Cow is so rare because people are afraid.

   If you’re remarkable, it’s likely that some people won’t like you. That’s part of the definition of remarkable. Nobody gets unanimous praise – ever. The best the timid can hope for is to be unnoticed. Criticism comes to those who stand out.

   Where did you learn how to fail? If you’re like most Americans, you leanred in first grade. That’s when you started figuring out that the safe thing to do was to fit in. The safe thing to do was to color inside the lines, don’t ask too many questions in class, and whatever you do, be sure your homework assignment fits on the stupplied piece of card stock.

   We run our schools like factories. We line kids up in straight rows, put them in batches (called grades), and work very hard to make sure there are no defective parts. Nobody standing out, falling behind, running ahead, making ruckus.

   Playing it safe. Following the rules. Those seem like the best ways to avoid failure. And in school, they may very well be. Alas, these rules set a pattern for most people (like your boss?), and that pattern is awefully dangerous. These are the rules that ultimately lead to failure. [Seth Godin argues that in the age of After Advertising, you have to shine with originality, because being normal and safe, you will blend with others in the sea of normal prodcuts and you will die]

6. Another decent point was that packaging DOES matter. (uhm yeah, think Apple Inc packaging)
7. Easy simple ‘actionable’ advice – Can you make your product collectible, to raise interest?
8. And I will wrap up with another great quote about having good customer service,
   

   “Does the post office hire annoying people, or just train them to be that way?”

Lesson from Prince of Persia 1

// July 12th, 2009 // No Comments » // experience, reflections

So I got my hands on Prince of Persia 1 (DOS version) and I started playing it. Unconvetionally, this game does not limit you in lives you can lose, but in time to beat the game – 1h. Part of the game is maneuvrability, part of the game is mazes you have to roam, and part of it are puzzles you have to solve. Every time you play for an hour and don’t complete the game, you have to start from the beginning. And there is no SAVE, just PAUSE.

So I did make a few tries to beat the game, each much better than the previous. But then I got pissed and decided to read about it in the net. First thing I found is that there is save. You just don’t have a menu and it’s a weird shortcut – CTRL+G. Well that changes a whole lot the concept, because if I waste a lot of time, I can loose the current play and keep playing from the good save (there’s only one save, no slots). Second thing I found is a walkthrough. What I found in the walkthrough was a few solutions to things god-knows-how-long-it-will-have-taken-me-to-solve. The guy that wrote the walkthrough actually said it took him and his dad 2 years to figure this one thing, and another 3 to figure out what to do next. So I did save countless hours of wandering and dying. The third thing i found was a speed run, in which I saw a few good shortcuts and tricks. So I beat the game and had sex with the princess…

But the point is – how long would I have kept playing if I didn’t do my research on the web, and didn’t find the walkthrough/speed run? I can’t imagine. And honestly it would have been a shame wasting so much time of my life. Which makes me wonder, why the hell are we so resistant to finding walkthroughs for anything else we do in life? If a 5 minute walkthrough saves us 1/2h every day, it’s tremendous advantage. If a 5 minute walkthrough saves us 1/2h once, but you do it all the time, it’s also a tremendous advantage.

The problem is that walkthroughs for life are not named ‘walkthroughs’, and we rarely make the right association to recognize the situations that can be much improved by a short googling of the problem. Have you ever googled folding a T-shirt? You fold at least 1 T-shirt a day average. How about keyboard shortcuts in Gmail? Or how about marketing your startup?

Like anything else is that you have to intentionally start forcing yourself to think about it, and try to recognize more often those situations. You have to actively pursue it and put effort in it. But boy, how do we do that…

2things

// June 10th, 2009 // No Comments » // experience, reflections

It’s really only one but it’s called 2things. We just launched a new beta –

www.2neshta.com

It’s a wonderful site for classifieds for Bulgaria. Sgot some bugs more to cleanup, but generally it’s pretty stable and well done [excl ie6 of course, which will be fixed later].

The story goes like that – there are 30+ sites that do the same thing and all do it really badly. So there is no mentality for posting ads, nor a good platform that makes posting easy. So there’s the classic chicken-or-the-egg question – is there no mentality because there is not decent platform, or is there no decent platform because there is no mentality and market for it? We will finally be able to tell that – there is a not only decent but great platform for classifieds – free, easy, fast, well designed, ad-free, registration free. What more can you ask?

So let’s cross fingers and start working out the steps from the guerrilla marketing.

Facebook Page

Reflections: Simple But Right

// February 1st, 2009 // No Comments » // reflections

After few generally non-alcoholic years, i rediscovered the Mojito cocktail. Quick google on recipes brought me to a very well done youtube video on making Mojitos that brought me to the website: http://bacardimojito.com/

Now tell me, how the hell do you make a full blown business out of 1 cocktail. Here’s how they did it:

• Great website – designwise, organizationwise, colorwise, musicwise…
• Instructional Videos – well made, spread around youtube etc
• Recipes – tiny collection of the best Mojito recipes
• 1 simple product – they sell for 13 bucks Mojito muddler, but boy – well made, from stainless steel. It looks so sexy, i wonder if people use it for other stuff.

When I submitted the contact form, it said I was number 19002 or something. Compete.com shows traffic in August 2008 of 120k! And those guys are not just enjoying their analytics account, they are selling products to this traffic. Everything is so well tied up. Good job guys!

That’s the perfect example of simple, but done right!

Almost everything can flourish and make it big if it’s done right. Sometimes it’s not easy to make it simple & right, but hey, that’s where the line is cut between those who can and those who can’t make it.

What are you going to make right?

Reflections: Why The Educational System Is Not In Place

// June 3rd, 2008 // No Comments » // reflections

[Pic by atomicjeep]

I don’t like school. I don’t like going to school. I don’t like the things we do there nor the way we do them. I think that schools are fundamentally wrong in the approach to teaching students how to be successful.

There were specific reasons and needs that led to the existence of the educational systems. However, the world and so our needs have changed but the schools have not adjusted.

Internet was basically created around 1970′s. TV first was introduced in 1930′s. Radio was commercially available around the 1920′s. Now imagine life before those. The only wires that would come to your house are the electrical wires. That pretty much rules out everything we ever do these days. No computers, no video games, no television. All you can do is play soccer out with your friends, drink home-made alcohol or read books.

And indeed, if you needed any information you would have to read books. But it is not like you had encyclopedias to look up everything you wanted. You had to read many books and slowly accumulate the information you need piece by piece, book by book. Let’s say you wanted to know about Paris? Your only choice would be reading a bunch of books that maybe take place in Paris and thus overread facts here and there about this city across the ocean. But it also wasn’t like people had books in their houses like we do today. And how many libraries were there? And how easy was it to get access to them? Or even just to travel to the big city with the libraries. It’s not like everything was concentrated in few big cities 200 years ago. Also, if you were lucky, you could listen to stories of people that have been to Paris. But how many people could afford that? How long did it take them to get to Paris across the ocean on a boat? Those stories were few and probably most of them became legends.

All in all, there was huge demand for information and lack of supply. Thus simply by acquiring more information you’d be ahead of others. Simply by reading more you’d be more knowledgeable, gain more recognition, be able to get involved in business, meet influential people. You would be able to learn about the newest and greatest opportunities. Being knowledgeable at the time already gave you social status.

So in a sense, to do anything in this world, you needed to go to school where you could collect information, learn, and meet other knowledgeable people. Naturally, organized state-supported schools emerged. Their primary purpose was to disseminate knowledge across as many people as possible with fewer resources as possible. That meant then paying 1 person to teach many. That meant having books that all kids read from. But notice that the focus was just on spreading information. Thirst for information was the main driver for the formation of this monstrous educational system that is in place today. It was the most efficient way back at the time. And it worked pretty well. It worked so well actually that in few short hundred years it introduced so many changes that have not been seen in the whole history of the world. It taught people knowledge and people invented things and so came radio, television, internet…

And this is how the educational system created its biggest competitor – the internet. The internet, along with all the other improvements have made the process of finding and acquiring information at cost approaching zero so trivial that the schools now seem out of place. While in the past there was a struggle and fight for more information, and the ones that had it were the successful ones, today everybody has information. All kinds of information! And at a price so low that we could probably safely claim to be free. The world has changed and being successful today is not just knowing more – because everybody knows a lot – it’s what you do with the information you do know. It’s how you satisfy the world’s needs that get you successful. And that is exactly what the schools are very bad at teaching. Schools specialized for hundreds of years to jam you with information and create that feeling of “You just come to us and do what we say and you will come out with a great degree!” But then what is a degree? An accomplishment in knowing a lot of information in certain area? But I just mentioned how this is not enough to be successful. So now we have that crisis – all college kids graduating and having random varieties of knowledge sets and not knowing what to do with it. They take random jobs they find often not connected with their majors. They panic for not knowing what to do and even more often how to do it.

Colleges seem to be taking small steps into correcting that problem but their pace is way too slow to keep up with the world’s changes. What the hell means, “You cannot cite Wikipedia as a source for your paper”? What it means is that colleges are too concentrated on self-centered, useless (in most cases of student papers), professional research and information gathering. Instead, colleges should start teaching people how to collect the information they need. They should as a matter of fact teach people how to determine which information they need. An entrepreneur is not a person that knows everything, it’s a person that knows what to learn when he needs it. We don’t all need to be entrepreneurs, but we all need to know how to cope with life, and this is not simply gathering information anymore.

Well, you could argue that schools never claimed that you would be successful after graduation. They just claim that you would know a lot on a certain topic. For one, this is not explicitly said, but is so implicitly stated that it is hard to think of college graduation anything but a step to success. We just don’t realize how small this step is and that is often a step backwards. And for another one, what are you after – a geeky knowledgeable bum that knows everything and has got nothing, or a successful person that knows only what he needs and could learn what he decides he needs?

So there is a growing number of people that recognize that problem and that try to do things on their own outside of school. They will have no support and now encouragement until they succeed. But hey, where there is a problem, there is a opportunity.

Life On Pause

// April 7th, 2008 // No Comments » // reflections

I have a friend of mine who’s blog is named “Live life in shuffle mode.” I will take this metaphor and extend it to my life – my life is on Pause.

Last 4 weeks have been really nuts. We worked really hard to launch feelgood. Then another 2 weeks of bugs fixing, introducing new features, and fixing browser compatibility. Throw in some midterms and some competition deadlines for a business plan to make it a little more spicy. I literally was shuttling between school and my desktop computer. I wake up, work a bit, run off to school, then take the train straight home, get food on the way and work till 4am. There goes my life. Paused.

I haven’t been doing any of the other things in life. My gym membership card sunk under some papers and design sketches. My credit card has got only McDonalds and Chipotle charges instead of drinks at bars. Haven’t seen a movie in a while and my Facebook status has been blaring “Update your status…”

I can’t complain though. This whole time has felt like an incredible run. I have enjoyed every minute of it. Building a product that you enjoy using and seeing the users slowly growing every day is so gratifying! It is such an irony that we have been working a number of years on random projects and never really launched anything even though we have always had the capabilities.

After each run you have to rest though. I have had completely free weekend to resume my life and reflect on the events last month. In a bit I will be ready for another dash.

Reflection: Why There Will Never Be A Startup (Bubble) Bust

// March 3rd, 2008 // 2 Comments » // reflections

[Pic by mysza831]

Just by reading TechCrunch every day you can’t help but wonder, “How the hell are there that many companies getting funded?” And that is just the tiny bit that is mentioned on TC. I shared that observation with my friend Alek, who jokingly (or not quite so) answered, “We’re in a Startup bubble ”

That got me thinking on the issue. There are a million definitions about a bubble, but generally – “a situation where market prices are unsustainably high”[I don't think there is such a word, but I got it from Wikipedia, so i guess there is]. Usually that happens as a result of overinvestment and development growth due to speculative inertia. Also, it is not explicitly stated, but a bubble is often associated with a Bust. As a matter of fact your are probably reading not because you want to know about the bubble, but because you are afraid of the Bust. But let me explain why there won’t be one.

I don’t need to bring too much data to convince you that Internet Startups are quite hot today. There is an army of angel investors that occupy the range of $0-$1mln along with VC’s that are targeting investments as low as $500,000. News sites keep coming up with brand new company names. Strange simplistic products become hits in an instant[away status products?]. Early stage venture capital companies like Ycombinator seem to be extremely popular lately. Applications grow in times each consecutive year. Even colleges have a standard practice of organizing competitions and funding the winner teams. Ladies and Gents, there is a gold rush if you haven’t noticed yet. But a Bubble & Bust? Nah. Because the internet market is like no other market:

There is a tremendous growth. Just like in real estate where developers build, people happily and readily buy, developers make more money and keep building. The one difference is – in the internet market new people just keep coming. No geographical area has such unbelievable influx of client??le. New people get hooked with bandwidth every second. People that have it increase their use of internet all the time because there is more stuff to do online. And more people means more developers and more products and more stuff to do. When does that end?? When supply of new people dries up. Not any time soon, I will tell ya that. Most of the internet users come for about 15 countries and total less than 1/2 billion. With more than 6.6 billion people there are quite a lot of future entries. With such dynamically increasing demand, how can this market be saturated?

Another interesting characteristic of the internet market is the movement speed of huge masses that can pick their belongings and move in a different building. Switching between products (email clients, social sites, tools, etc) can be done in incredibly short time by incredibly huge masses. Or for that matter adopt a new product/mindset. Think Gmail, YouTube, Friendster-MySpace-Facebook. That means new developments can target not only the tourists but also the locals. True, old buildings get tossed in garbage but so what? Owners made money, now it’s time for another venture or other entrepreneurs.

The third interesting thing is that the internet market sucks off the real world. Or should I try to present it better – is in symbiotic relationships with the real world. There is a constant addition of new ideas that are based on establishing the connection between the real world and the internet. Online TV, USPS online tracking, mp3 (players) and a gazillion other things are being now invented that make a wonderful bridge between the virtual and the touchable. With every new such feature fuels the internet, revamps the market and gives rise to other ingenious ideas. Net has catching up to do with real world and there’s plenty of opportunities for sucks off people and products from the real world.

It would seem naturally to make parallels with the Bubble in 2000. “If it happened then, it may happen now”, you would say. It’s quite different though – 2k was a flop because people realized the power of internet before the audience was ready. Huge speculation positions were taken while nobody believed in the Internet. Everybody jumped into making products that weren’t bad (and would probably have made money today) but the crowd was not convinced that internet will be part of their lives. Today, IT is not only a source of information, but a means of entertainment, and a medium for communication and social enterprises. The internet is becoming more and more an irreplaceable tool for almost everything. Before 2k it wasn’t so. As it happens very often – technology was ahead of mindset. Investors and entrepreneurs got burned. We now know the power of fire though, but we also know how to handle it.

Time IS going to come when there will be a slowdown due to the underdeveloped countries that can’t wire themselves. The big powers that could afford to wire themselves are doing it and when they are done things will indeed slow down. The Balloon will deflate but not Bust. The reason for this is that it has become tremendously cheap to build, scale, and maintain a product. If in the past the main investing players were VC’s with millions, today it is everybody that has an extra 10,000 or 100,000. That has huge implications on the Bubble effect because while before 2K valuing the market was based on few VC investments and few believers and a crazy amount of speculation about the future, today there is one source of information – the internet market. It is the ultimate measuring stick. It is composed of millions of businesses and small websites each of which has a pulse. We can measure that pulse and we can go in hibernate mode if needed. But we won’t default.

So my prediction is that Startup culture will keep growing healthily. It will also make deep changes our perception of careers. As the internet gets more integrated with the real world businesses and as those connections get systematized, it will become quite easy to start a regular business too, like never before. It will become much more common for people to have the mindset of business starters than company employees. No bubble, no bust – just growth, growth, growth.

PS external factors like World War or Net Neutrality, etc. not considered

Experience: The Down Moments Of Entrepreneurship

// February 28th, 2008 // 2 Comments » // experience

When I started this blog I set off to create a full story of my entrepreneurial struggle. I have been working on it mostly implicitly by writing out my thoughts and keeping up book reviews with what I read. I feel though that an explicit update is needed every now and then, so here is one that explains my current whereabouts.

After having been through a billion ideas and finished none, I decided to jump into ONE thing ONLY and pull it off till the end. My choice was Snartle.com, the language learning site since I trust my guts and feel like my theory of how a mind is able to suck new information will be right. In addition, the market is growing like crazy. Livemocha (got 2mln funding I believe) and SpanishPod both made the Times the other day, and I think neither is really good or with much innovation in methodoly of learning. They just are there and in such market whoever is there makes it (apparently really well too).

But I mentioned how I have been struggling between looking for funding and making it myself. We finally settled for funding, and no surprise – it feels like we chose wrong. On the other side, I am pretty sure it would have felt the same way if we went with building it. So funding is planned through winning the the Merrill Lynch competition and if we don’t win it (which I feel we have decent chances) I will be totally lost. If I then decide to build it, I would have gone BOTH paths to reach the target. Why didn’t I just tried making it off the beginning? My guilty consciousness will chase me for a long time. Though if we do win the 60,000 from Zicklin, then…..then there’s going to be more posts.But for now, got no product – just a business plan ‘in construction’.

So far so OK. I feel like I am on the right track and I push. Before I know it though, I am filling a new YC application – this time it was supposed to be just a joke. As a project, we decided to use our first launch (for five years!) – a blog. A blog we launched for all this time! It was a music blog and it felt good to put some of our favorite music online and listen to it and share with friends. Turns out Alek was serious about the YC app, which he filled quite diligently, and that he has serious plans about it. I realize now our music blog was the beginning of a new startup, which we will be launching in … 2 weeks?!@# How da hell did I get involved in another startup again?! Our blog, you can find at thefeelgood.com. It has got some good music today, and stay tuned for the startup launch.

Meanwhile more ideas keep coming to me (yes, they will all end up here). One of them seems to be stuck with me for some time. I haven’t shared it online because I believe I may decide to do in the near future when I have resources.

Actually resources is what I really wanted to talk about. I have no job. Ever since I decided to work on ONE thing I have been trying not do anything but work on the startup, which meant absolutely no wasting time on crappy external jobs. Now though I am running out of money and this drives me nuts. My budget has thinned out to mere $100/mo that I can live on besides my fixed costs of another $200 (subway, cell, credit card). I am basically surviving on $400/mo in New York and this is crazy. What is crazier is that soon the last few hundred bucks that I have will run out. I have to take a job but what I can do is apply at my school for a job under $10/h which is just a waste of life, or I can work some side projects as a freelancer. I used to make Flash sites like this one, but now I think that connection soured up. It’s nuts to think how people that work the crappiest jobs have more money than me. It’s a psychological breakdown. I may have to crack open and take a job or I will starve. ‘Die’ is probably the right word here, since I am already starving.

I already talked about the Up’s and Down’s of the roller coaster and here is another wonderful example of a down. It is quite a down this time – deeeeep and loooong. I am miserable and I am barely surviving. And it seems like it will keep going worse. If it wasn’t for the possible upsides that I see in a few months from now, I would have given up. But that insane feeling that “I am almost done” with something and soon “it will pay off” is just not going away, and drags me down, and down, and down.

Let me mention some more just for a little color. My wisdom tooth is growing – as to be taken out some time soon and yes, you guessed it – I can’t pay for it. My stomach pains me. Hmm..yes, I should be eating better food. But what better food when I am eating anything I can find? I just cut my hair on my own, since I have to otherwise pay 15 bucks, with which I can eat at least 3 times. I have never had such attitude towards money saving but times change and when you don’t have money, elasticity can get practically to zero;

Damn that UP should be right around the corner because I am in B I G trouble…

Reflections: Exploration For Efficiency

// February 20th, 2008 // 1 Comment » // reflections

Tennis is pretty much like any other sport – how good you are depends not only on accuracy and strength but also on the variety of tricks you can pull in different situations. Wider the variety of shots you can perform, the higher the probability you will maximize efficiency by choosing the right one. Now this is where the person’s character begins to matter. Some like to concentrate and master perfectly the basics they have been taught, but others enjoy trying shots between legs, behind their back, demi-volleys etc. Your character defines the way you will behave at training and the type of stuff you will learn. In a match against a smart opponent, your wonderfully mastered forehand doesn’t do much because you will barely get the chance to use it.

Same goes for startups. To be good at a startup you have to have a wide range of tricks under your sleeves. But how do we get them? Well, experience obviously. Here’s one specific way to build experience: we live in a world of rules and laws. A lot of them are written down and can’t be crossed, but there are many many more that are not explicitly stated and under certain circumstances CAN be trespassed. Those are the ones you should be testing, exploring, and sizing. Here is what I mean:

Nobody ‘should’ cut a line in a store. But if you cut a line 10 times you may figure out that 5 out of those times people really don’t mind it. As a whole you are quite ahead of everybody. We can argue about ethics, but here the principle of testing is important. My little brother is extremely good at pushing limits to find the size of the playing field so he can use the whole width of it. He, for example, would drive you nuts just to figure out at what point you break. Then he knows that and can keep you on the edge always, thus maximizing his own proceeds. Again, this is an awkward example, but this applies also for how to deal with investors, negotiation, determining your burn rate and so on.

It’s hard (and probably pointless) to try and name specific steps you should be taking for ‘exploration’ but in any case you should be aware of it and watch out for those opportunities. Easiest way to spot them is when you meet an obstacle. Then you should just turn around and think, “Which soft limits can I cross so that I can get through this?” What is harder is getting at that ‘state of mind’ so you are automatically thinking of what you can do extra and go further even before being roadblocked. It doesn’t come naturally and you have to impose it consciously, but after a while it becomes your nature to see extra solutions, stop less in front of barriers, and enjoy life and all of it’s pleasures to the max.