The Potential Freedom In Being The World's Worst Entrepreneur

almostfitz (32)in #worst • 6 years ago (edited)

I'm three months into the launch of my new company. I've received local funding, run my numbers and shit-tested my business model over and over. But something is holding me up. Call it a healthy dose of paranoia, but last night I was struck by the idea that I’m not progressing as fast on my new startup as I would like because my ego is wrapped up in the idea of how good this next thing I’m doing has to be. That one idea is holding me back from often doing the next simple thing that would move my business forward. So starting today, my mindset to try to fix this is going to be:

“How would I act if knew I was the World’s Worst Entrepreneur, but still wanted this business to succeed?”

To me, that means:

Assume your ideas are naturally terrible and disastrous rather than prosperous and magnanimous
Use data and objective decision making to shit-test your decisions rather than assuming you’re making the right choice because you know what you’re doing
Be wary of every dollar that you spend because you are not in fact sure that you will be able to earn it back through this business
Listen attentively and takes notes from everyone around you as if you had something to learn from them (because you do)
Assume that when things go well it was largely luck and not skill, and when things go poorly find out whether it was a bad idea, bad timing or bad luck
Something is only done well if people are willing to pay you well for it

To be clear, I'm not assuming some identity of the World's Worst Entrepreneur. That clearly has all kinds of problems all with their own downsides. I'm simply saying that I'm going to use this line of questioning to set my new default to: