April 3, 2017 - Comments Off on Commonplace #0047

Commonplace #0047

If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything.

Try acting like a hero; maybe people will come to believe you.

The metagame is this psychological game that exists among players, involving adjustments – adjustments based on how an opponent is likely to interpret a given set of actions. Better players adjust their strategies and styles to those of particular opponents, always analyzing how the opponents are playing in terms of how the opponents believe they're playing.

Maintaining a well-balanced strategy, while deciphering your opponents' strategies, is the key to the metagame. If you comprehend the concept of the metagame, accurately perceive the flow of your table and then tournament, and stay alerted to and aware of current strategy trends, you'll be able to successfully mix up your play when considering your image and that of your opponents. In return, your game will be highly unpredictable and difficult to read, which should be your ultimate goal.

The trouble is that the performance of a company always depends on both skill and luck, which means that a given strategy will succeed only part of the time. So attributing success to any strategy may be wrong simply because you’re sampling only the winners. The more important question is: How many of the companies that tried that strategy actually succeeded?

Pattern recognition is an essential skill in venture capital. While the elements of success in the venture business do not repeat themselves precisely, they often rhyme. In evaluating companies, the successful venture capitalist will often see something that reminds them of patterns they have seen before. It might be the style, chemistry or composition of the team or the nature of the business plan. Some things will be fundamentally different but other things may be familiar. While the pattern will be similar, something in what the team is doing will seem to break a rule. Part of the pattern that is being recognized is a rule breaking innovation of some kind which drives new value.

The great entrepreneurs tend to be persistent, obsessive and relentless, but the really great entrepreneurs also seem to have a gift for looking at the world from a customer’s viewpoint.

These entrepreneurs seem to know instinctively what the customer wants.

The best entrepreneurs are the ones who are passionate about solving a problem because they’ve had it or seen others have it, love those customers, love solving that problem or have been domain experts. Those are authentic entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, at their heart, are artists. … What comes out from the great artists is something completely unexpected. World class entrepreneurs understand something that is driven by passion.

Founders fit the definition of a composer: they see something no one else does. And to help them create it from nothing, they surround themselves with world-class performers. This concept of creating something that few others see – and the reality distortion field necessary to recruit the team to build it – is at the heart of what startup founders do. It is a very different skill than science, engineering, or management. Entrepreneurial employees are the talented performers who hear the siren song of a founder’s vision. Joining a startup while it is still searching for a business model, they too see the promise of what can be and join the founder to bring the vision to life.

Total Time to Product/Market Fit has to be less than 1-2 years or else your startup will implode. Ask anyone who’s been working on a product for more than 2 years and doesn’t have traction to show: It really, really sucks. The first 6 months can be fun because it feels like you’re painting on a blank canvas, but soon enough, there’s just fatigue and the window of opportunity shifts. Platforms change, investors get disengaged, your employees start getting excited about other companies. So if you miss your window, then you’ll run out of money or energy or both.”

When you understand something, you know how to break the rules.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

To achieve something you’ve never achieved before, you must learn and practice something that you’ve never done before.

Rich people are always looking for ways to create value, to develop and produce products and services that enrich and enhance the lives and work of other people.

They are always willing to put in before they take out. They do not believe in easy money or something for nothing. Rich people believe that you have to justly earn and pay for, in terms of toil and treasure, any rewards and riches that you desire.

Poor people lack this fundamental understanding, the direct relationship between what you put in and what you get out. They are always seeking to get something for nothing or for as little as possible. They want success without achievement, riches without labor, money without effort, and fame without talent.

Poor people gamble, buy lottery tickets, come to work at the last possible moment, waste time while they are there, and then leave work at the first possible minute. They line up by the hundreds and thousands to audition for programs like American Idol, thinking that they can become rich and famous without ever having paid the price necessary to develop the level of talent and ability that enables them to rise above their competitors.

One of the great secrets of becoming wealthy is to always do more than you are paid for. If you do, you will always be paid more than you’re getting today. And there is no other way.

Go the extra mile. Be willing to put in far more than you are taking out. There are never any traffic jams on the extra mile

I will study and prepare myself and someday my chance will come.

There are no secrets of success. There are simply timeless truths and universal principles that have been discovered and rediscovered throughout human history. All you have to do is to learn and practice them to enjoy all the success that you could desire.

Thought is the original source of all wealth, all success, all material gain, all great discoveries and inventions, and of all achievement.

If you don’t delight a customer you don’t create a viral effect because delight is the greatest form of virality.

In technology, one company can dominate a market due to network effects, so losing focus on delighting customers can be a fatal mistake.

Network effects often drive virality. But another thing that drives virality is delight.

Network effects exist when a product gets more valuable the more people use it. Network effects are about increasing value and drive business success by increasing the size of a business’s moat. Virality is about increasing speed of adoption and lowering customer acquisition cost (CAC).

Products that exhibit viral growth depend on person-to-person transmission as a necessary consequence of normal product use. Growth happens automatically as a side effect of customers using the product.

Growth should ideally be driven by a natural byproduct of customers generating core product value from their use of the product. The less optional the sharing activity the more naturally viral the product is. Customer should derive value from sharing the product with others without the process feeling forced.

If, after several turns in your career and life, you return to the same idea, pursue it. Your creation is as much an act of self-expression at that point.

Build the stuff that makes the real world easier to use.

You can’t wait for another company to make the technology you need to build what you’re destined to build. You must develop it yourself.

If your core idea is your North Star, go ahead and build a constellation around it. Just avoid adding stars that’ll shine alone in another galaxy—they rarely get as bright.

Published by: seanwing in notes

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