THE JRNY 015 - Being Above Average Requires Practice
Hey Reader 👋 ,
I always have different moods that change every 2 weeks or so.
My previous mood was that I'd be fine having a regular job that paid well and doing fun stuff on the side.
Having thinking it over for a few days, I realized that I wasn't comfortable doing things only for fun. It didn't sit well with me that I was doing all these things (singing, learning Vietnamese, playing badminton) that didn't build a better future for myself.
That's why, out of all the possible paths that I could take, I decided to focus on something that might build a better future for myself, that I've always been interested in and that I think I'd be good at: Entrepreneurship / Building Businesses.
This isn't the first time I've had this thought, in fact, over the many years that I've thought of what to do with my life, building businesses has always been in the back of my mind. My main problem was that I never had "the right idea".
Most people (I think) who want to go into entrepreneurship face this same problem. You think of an idea, start it a little bit and then realize that there might be a better idea or an idea with a better success rate so you abandon the current one.
And today I realized, while playing badminton, that this is such a stupid mentality to have.
My goal is to build a great business (or businesses if I'm lucky) and, at the moment, I might know a few things here and there about business, but overall, I don't know shit about business.
And sure, I can spend my time, reading about businesses, learning about businesses, interviewing people that have businesses and that might make me slightly better at understanding them...
But the only true way of building a great business, in my opinion, is to practice, practice, practice and practice... by actually building businesses.
What business to build? It honestly doesn't matter. I gave myself 3 rules for this:
It has to be a business that helps people
It has to be a business that I could be a potential customer for (aka solves one of my problems)
It has to have (a) good product(s)
Once I have an idea, the next step is just to run with it and iterate, iterate, iterate. Failure is the best teacher. If I can avoid failing, then obviously I'll try to avoid it, but, inaction is often worst than a bad action in my opinion.
I think a lot of people, myself included, wait for that perfect idea because we want that one-hit homerun so we keep constantly waiting for the perfect pitch to come instead of just constantly swinging until we're good enough to hit any pitch or we get lucky enough to hit a homerun.
The GOATs (Greatest of All Time) in every industry/domain/art/sport became GOATs by playing, losing, analyzing their losses, practicing (iterating) and then playing again. This is a constant loop that is applied again and again until eventually they played and won.
Business is no different. Expecting to become great at it by never playing or only playing in my head is simply delusional.
With that being said,
LET'S PUT IN THE WORK AND KEEP SWINGING.
PEACE.
Hey you ! Thanks for reading, I hope you enjoyed this post.
If you like something in the article or simply want to discuss with me or give me some constructive feedback, feel free to email me @ onlythetruenjhs@gmail.com
We'll talk more next time and until then, don't forget to enjoy your life! ✌️
— Nicholas