It doesn’t matter what cause you decide to join or whom you decide to help.
What matters is that you cared enough to change something for the better.
Alleviating suffering, of any kind, is a noble pursuit—whether it be sea turtles, pollution, the elderly, the sick or hungry, at home or afar…
There is no room to say your cause is better than mine. There is too much work to do and not enough time for that sort of thing.
Simply, act.
Technology disrupts all of our lives.
It destroys the perfect and enables the impossible.
For every three problems technology solves though, five more are created. Problems that we never knew existed.
Before airplanes were invented, there was no such thing as a fear of flying. You didn’t struggle to afford a plane ticket to get across the Atlantic. There was no need to worry about an attack from above or the need for airports or aeronautical engineering. There was no need for pilots or flight attendance.
Get ready.
More opportunities to solve interesting problems are coming.
You don’t need an MBA, a business plan, VCs lined up.
You certainly don’t need a bigger badge or more authority.
You’ll be waiting a long time for market conditions to be perfect.
Forget about even having a product. (Much easier to find the customers you want to serve and make a product for them.)
It’s tempting to continue to polish instead of doing something brave like shipping an imperfect product.
Yuri Gagarin wasn’t ready to be launched into space. They basically stuck some tin foil on him and said here you go, good luck.
When Karl Benz launched the car in Europe it was against the law to drive. Plus there were no gas stations or roads.
Less than 10% of Europe was literate at the time when Gutenberg’s printing press was invented. What a terrible time to get into the book packaging business.
Your idea will never be perfect. You’re never going to be ready. You don’t need to wait around for the world to qualify or give you permission to make the change you are seeking to make.
The only prerequisite you need is to care.
Go.
Do.
Do!
We live in a imperfect world.
A world that is constantly trying to suck us in.
It’s not our job to eliminate all of the suffering in the world but to alleviate some of it.
All that we can.
Don’t let them get you down for trying to make it a better place.
It is often said that the key to good writing is re-writing. This is true. Re-writing is an important skill to develop.
The cost of failure in today’s market has never been lower. (Think digital.)
The challenge moving forward is not polishing, it’s shipping.
We are caught up in the idea that our work needs to be perfect before we ever bring it to market. Because, deep down, we are afraid. We are afraid that the work we do isn’t good enough. We are afraid of being judged.
The thing is, your product, your good, your service will never be perfect the day you ship. And neither will you.
Isaac Asimov wrote over 400 books in his lifetime. He wrote for eight hours day, every day.
Why?
Because he was professional.
When he was stuck on a novel, he didn’t quit writing until he felt like writing again. No. He wrote and wrote and wrote. Bad writing, good writing, it didn’t matter.
Not every book he wrote became a national bestseller. But do enough bad writing eventually some good writing will surface.
So you could make more sales calls, knock more doors, send more emails using the little trust and attention that’s left to gain short-term profits.
You could fire everyone on the sales team, until you don’t recognize the company you keep.
You could call another meeting and assign more blame.
You could look for more short cuts and shave more edges, saving another quarter of a cent per unit.
But, then again, you’ve already tried that.
Or…
Maybe it’s time to fire the 20% of customers that generate little value and are taking 80% of your time.
Maybe this is an opportunity to recommit to the promises you’ve made: Are you being the person you say you are?
Maybe it’s time to stop measuring ourselves through magical digits and bits and start focusing on how we are going to help someone that needs to be helped.
There is more to life than being the fastest or the cheapest or the biggest.
It easy to blame the driver for poor performance.
So one simple, easy solution is to switch drivers.
But overtime, what you will find is that switching drivers doesn’t actually fix the problem.
The driver has taken this vehicle as fast and as far it can go.
You’re better off switching vehicles.
It doesn’t really matter that you did everything to spec, under budget and that your product shipped without a glitch.
It doesn’t matter when you shave a little here and a little there to save a few bucks.
It doesn’t matter that you greeted every customer that walked in the door today the same way you did yesterday.
What matters is: Did you care enough? Did you care enough to look someone in the eye and tell them the truth, something that they needed to hear (not just what they wanted to hear).
Your job isn’t to answer emails and to sit through meetings. No, your job is to make a difference. Making a difference starts with a person willing and eager to say, “I am going to do this.”
You’re not one in a million. You’re actually one in seven billion. You are unique beyond measure and you are more powerful than you think you are. So stand up and make a ruckus. Go do something interesting. Make some noise. Play a note worth playing.
The world will always be in short supply of people that care. We need you, desperately, to show up.
There are certain threads each of us are capable of pulling. The problem is we become comfortable at letting other people pull the strings.
We are happy and content until we are no longer happy and content.
We wait too long for things to happen to us instead of inventing a different future. The longer we wait the harder it is to pull.
Yeah, we don’t know what is going to happen. That’s the point. Nothing begins to unravel unless we become curious.
We reach an understanding of the world by:
The world comes into our consciousness as a narrative, a story we have already told. We see what we want to see to preserve ourselves. But what is critical to our survival now, isn’t the same as it was 7,000 years ago. A saber tooth tiger isn’t going to pounce us, even though we think it will.
Technology and education and modern medicine and industrialization have significantly improved our lives. We live in the safest world in human history. Yet, we continue to make tons of decision based on incorrect perceptions on what the world really is.
It is unlikely to ever make your fears completely go away. So, instead of trying to make the fear go away, embrace it. Learn to dance with it.
[Read more about this idea from Roz and Ben Zander’s book.]
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