Welcome to Things I Wish I Knew Earlier Sunday!
Here are 3 Big Ideas for you to consider this week.
Idea 1: The only future-proof career path in the modern world is iterative entrepreneurship.
“Get a real job” used to be the reasonable, safe career advice.
Find a nice job with solid benefits. Hunker down for 30 years. Fund retirement accounts.
But not any more.
The wheel of innovation is spinning too fast.
Technology is allowing startups to up-end entire industries over night.
But not too long ago “get a real job” was the risky advice.
Just a couple hundred years ago, conventional wisdom was to find a small tract of land and a milk cow.
The Industrial Revolution offered farmers multiples on their annual income to give up their land and milk cow in exchange for a job at a factory.
Henry Ford and his contemporaries figured out how to pair machines with organized human effort to make everyone richer.
The industrialists got obscenely rich.
Their success meant they needed more laborers to work in their factories.
So they developed the public school system.
Why?
So they could have a system to generate employee prospects.
Public school to generate factory workers.
Trade schools to generate skilled blue collar workers.
Universities to generate skilled white collar workers.
And this system served us well for 100 years.
The technological revolution we’ve lived through over the last thirty years created similar results as the Industrial Revolution, except way faster.
The technologists at the head of a few tech companies got fantastically wealthy and the people involved in those organizations got correspondingly wealthy.
Just like the industrialists, the technologists have completely changed the work landscape.
Knowledge and information work is quickly outpacing employment. The internet is enabling tons of people to work from home, to start side businesses, and to build businesses that fund their dream lifestyle.
All businesses have owners.
If you are employed by other entrepreneurs, then you are subject to losing your job when the landscape of the market shifts.
If you own the business, you can pivot operations. You can iterate. You can identify new problems to solve.
It’s not hard to imagine a world in the not so distant future where AI and other technologies are changing the world at such a rapid rate that entrepreneurs are continually re-orienting, pivoting, and iterating.
And the entrepreneurs who have developed the best skill sets will thrive in that dynamic world.
The only future-proof career path in the modern world is iterative entrepreneurship.
Idea 2: Business = Transactions + Story
The biggest lie in the professional world is that business is complicated.
At the end of the day, every business has two components: (1) a flow of transactions and a story.
All business begins at the point of sale, the transaction, the exchange of value.
You have a problem. I offer to solve that problem for a reasonable fee. You agree. I solve your problem. You pay me.
Every business in the world, from Apple to the local lemonade stand, starts at the point of sale.
And without this point of sale, there is no business.
Apple started when some person bought the first Apple I computer from Steve Wozniak in 1976. Then Steve Wozniak joined forces with another famous Steve (Jobs) to shrink that computer down and put it in the pockets of every person on earth. Their efforts sold many, many more computers on the way to becoming the most valuable company in the world.
The lemonade stand started when little Susie begged her mom to buy some lemons and sugar and Solo cups for her to sell her first cup of lemonade.
The more cups of lemonade Susie sells, the more profitable her stand becomes.
In one sense, a business is nothing more than a bundle of transactions that happen over a period of time.
The story is everything about the business other than the transactions.
The story tells customers what the company is, why it exists, who it serves.
The story says
“this is where we have been”
“this is where we are”
“this is where we are going”
Every phone call, text message, social post, and email to customers and potential customers tells the story.
Sometimes the transactions come first.
Other times the story comes first.
But the story of every company shares one common feature:
The story of the founder’s life.
There’s an old proverb that I can’t remember well enough to quote. The paraphrase is something like this:
A company is just a long shadow of one man.
The great companies end up creating a story of their own above and beyond their founders, but you can’t tell Amazon’s story without Jeff Bezos or Microsoft’s story without Bill Gates or Apple’s story without Steve Jobs or Tesla’s story with Elon Musk.
Berkshire Hathaway’s story is an extension of Warren Buffett’s life.
But you don’t have to be Elon or Warren to build a great company.
In fact, in the internet age, founding a company that funds your ideal lifestyle has never been easier.
The barriers to entry are lower than ever.
People like Dan Koe, Justin Welsh, and Matt Gray are doing amazing work to show you how to build a business around your interests.
Just don’t overthink it.
All you need to start a business is a way to generate transactions and a story to wrap around those transactions.
You need a vision for your business, a plan that will bring that vision into reality, and the courage to work that plan (and iterate it) long enough to see success.
Business = a bundle of transactions + a story
Idea 3: The 4 tools of self-organization are action lists, routines, calendars, and time blocks
Time, not money, is our greatest asset;
Therefore,
time management is our greatest skill.
One of the primary reasons why people decide to become their own boss is to take control of their time.
But no one teaches you how to organize your self, how to manage your own time when you can do whatever you want.
Four invaluable time management tools I wish I would have known how to use earlier:
1) Action Lists
Whether you are employee or an entrepreneur, your day is made up of a bunch of actions that hopefully move your business and life forward. Your action list is simply the storehouse for the actions you need to do each day.
Before I moved the systems for my entire life into Notion, I used Apple Notes. A written notebook works fine, too.
The point here isn’t where and how to use your action list, it is to encourage you to use an action list in the first place.
Stephen Covey defined integrity as, “making and keeping promises,” in his book The 8th Habit. Your action list is where you document commitments you make to others and later on follow through by completing those actions.
2) Routines
Some actions only need to be done once. Others need to be done over and over. Save yourself a bunch of time by documenting how you do the repeatable tasks, when you do them, and in what order.
Basic routines you should have in place are your morning routine and your night-time routine. I wake up, brush my teeth, weigh, take supplements, and make coffee every day. Then I walk and review my goals. Then I sit down and write. The writing initiates my work routine
You can build these routines into your daily action list to bring order and uniformity to your days. If you fill those routines and action lists with high-value actions that drastically move you toward your goals, then you become unstoppable.
3) Calendars
Every now and then I’ll come across someone who just doesn’t use a calendar. Not a Google calendar or an iCalendar. Not even a written calendar.
And those people…are psychos. Your calendar is the ultimate time management and promise-keeping tool.
Document the meetings you commit to. Document the tasks you need to do. Put them all on your calendar.
At this point, when opportunities come along, you can verify you don’t yet have other prior commitments before saying yes.
4) Workblocks
One of the most important concepts for modern entrepreneurs: deep work.
The amount of information coming at us constantly now is staggering. And everyone is trying to call on your attention.
Living in this maelstrom of activity full-time is detrimental to productivity. Deep work is the antidote.
Work blocks are blocks of time dedicated to doing specific work.
- one hour to make calls
- thirty minutes to respond to emails
- two hours for writing
Once you identify those activities that move you forward most drastically, put workblocks on your calendar to do focused work on those activities.
Learn more about how to implement workblocks in your life by reading Cal Newport’s book entitled Deep Work.
The 4 tools of self-organization are action lists, routines, calendars, and time blocks.