Being an entrepreneur is similar to being a newlywed: Everyone has a piece of advice to ‘gift’ you with. Some of it is helpful; some isn’t. Some advice will be just plain weird. Among the mixed bag of advice that you’ll hear throughout your career, here are three best pieces of advices.
- It’s more important to ship passion than wait on perfection. It’s terrifying to put your ideas out into the world; you could be laughed at, ridiculed, slammed, and so much more. It’s easier to keep chipping away at a project until you are absolutely sure of its perfection than to reveal a work in progress. But, today, every piece of a work has to be a work in progress. It’s the only way to stay relevant.
A quote by Theodore Roosevelt might be relevant to this. The quote is “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold knew neither victory nor defeat.”
- Beware of the ugly baby syndrome. Some people love their ideas so much that they refuse to see that it actually isn’t very pretty. Don’t love your idea because you created it. Be open to objectively analyzing, changing, and — if necessary — moving on from a bad idea.
- Differentiate or die. Today, you should expert stiff competition in almost every industry and it is more important than ever to differentiate yourself. No matter what business you are in, find a way to stand out. — Agencies
