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When you think you want something, think again.

When you think you want something, either:

  1. Stop lying to yourself that you really want it. Ask yourself: do you only want it in theory or also in practice?
  2. Just shut up and start doing it, and see if it’s really true that you do want it. Maybe it’s not really true. Daydreaming (in theory) is nice.

A good goal is something that drives you to take action in the present moment.

If you are scared of something, pay attention to that.

Fears are a temporary glimpse at reality. It can be helpful if you address it. Mitigate the downsides that you’re afraid will happen. Ideally, get to the point that the odds are in favour of this thing working out.

“Everything I’ve learnt — I’ve learnt in reflection (through journaling)”
 — Derek Sivers

Don’t just echo your thoughts. Internalise it. Reflect on what you have learnt. Whenever something feels like a fact, ask if it is really true.

Ask: Why not now?

Realise what your priorities are.

The longer you wait, the smarter you get.

Daydreaming about ideas is nice. Doing some research, fantasizing about how it will all work out gives you hope and excitement. After some time, the idea fades. A new idea would appear. After more time, that will fade too and something else will jump in.

What does this mean? You are just enjoying daydreaming. One shiny idea after another.

An idea from Derek Sivers: Try planning detailed possible futures — as some kind of middle ground between purely daydream and a specific plan.

Every now and then, look at your list of “possible futures” and make one happen when you think the timing is perfect.

Advice for people who are looking to pivot their career: Make a list of “possible futures” for whether you would or would not pivot your career. Read “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”.

Build up your career capital. When you want to make a pivot, spend and use it wisely, so that you can do it laterally.

Wanting to grow your business means you are looking at just one leg of the table. Remember the other three legs.

Ask: Why do you think you want or need to grow?

When someone wants to start a business without knowing what to do, it is like saying I want to put a bandage on a wound that does not exist.

A business is a solution to a problem. If there is no problem, then there is no need for a solution.

A business is an act of service. If the problem goes away, you don’t have to do this business anymore.

Are your clients or customers screaming “please grow your business”? If the answer is no, don’t pay attention to that. Focus more on serving them and solving their problems.

Your actions say more about your values much more than your words.

Actions reveal your true values, what you really want, and what you truly prioritise.

Observe what you say vs what you do. Learn to let go of some goals.

All, Business, Creativity, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Personal Development, StartupLeave a comment

Here’s why you shouldn’t aim to be original

Nothing in this world is completely original because nothing comes from nowhere. All ideas and creative work builds on what came before. It’s all been said before, yet too often we let the pressure of creating something original cripple us from actually processing these thoughts or inspirational ideas into actual work. “Oh, I could create the next UBER, but wait, that already exists.” “This would look nice but I shouldn’t do that, it’s too similar to *name of inspirational artist*’s work, I need something more original. How do I be more original?”

Why do we do that to ourselves? All great ideas were once inspired by good ideas. That’s how ideas get better. If it weren’t the case, the world would be dominated by monopolies in every industry or stuck in a rut. Furthermore, having competitors challenge the “original ideas” keeps them on their toes and prevents them from getting lazy. In essence, anyone who wants to create something great should understand that it’s all been said before, but it might not have all been done before.

It’s possible to create something greater if you stop focusing on producing something that sprung from an idea that is not anybody else’s idea. This takes the pressure off. Then you can create something that’s truly your own if you pay attention to wherein lies the difference, the opportunity gap, what you can do to improve it or make it unique to yourself.

That’s how GRAB/GO-JEK came around, with new ideas of GRABPAY and GRABFOOD now challenging the original notions of the shared economy being limited to just shared riding. It’s how Airbnb differentiates itself from other platforms like HomeAway — it hosts more than 4 million listings in over 191 countries, and anyone can become an Airbnb host and rent out spaces from a small room to a whole, big house. The platform also thrives on its unique and creative home experiences like staying in a house made entirely of lego bricks. Users can rent anything from a tree-house to Donald Trump’s childhood home (if you’re into that sort of thing).

So, don’t be original, be a remix.

Be a mash up of what you choose to allow into your life. You are the average output of all your influences. Embrace them.

Don’t think of how to be original. Don’t let originality intimidate you, don’t try to escape creating by taking the easy way out. “I would really love to write something, but I can’t think of a unique topic to write about. Until then, I shall not write and look for something unique to write about.”

That mindset breeds severe procrastination and inefficiency. Try this: Write about what you like. Create ideas similar to those you admire. If you like something, don’t plagiarise it. Plagiarising is passing someone else’s idea exactly as your own. Instead, read up about it. Explore everything involving the creation of that idea or piece of art. What influenced the artist? Was it her thoughts? Was it her daily habits? Her family? Did she take a walk in a beautiful park before feeling inspired to write that story? Picture yourself in those activities. Feel what she felt. Seek out the influences that lead to good ideas or good art. Then, solely focus on creating whatever you like while considering these influences. Write the story you want to read. Create the kind of art you’d love to see in galleries. Let your work be messy, with the sole focus of pleasing yourself.

Don’t wait for original ideas to come to you. Start creating before you’re ready. You are ready.

Remember, you don’t have to be great to get started, but you do have to get started to become great. Life is not about finding ourselves, it’s about creating ourselves.

All, Business, Entrepreneurship, Innovation, StartupLeave a comment

Want to scale your business? Think small instead.

We often think of the possibilities of an idea before we expand on it. If it’s too small, it sounds boring, unexciting — we think: this won’t work, I’ll probably only have 10 customers. I need something bigger.

I recently listened to a Tim Ferris podcast episode by Reid Hoffman of LinkedIn and Brian Chesky of Airbnb and here are the really useful insights I gained.

The truth is, it’s really hard to get even 10 people to love something.

But if you spend enough time with them, it’s not that hard. So, learn what people love. Sit in the shoes of a child about to play building blocks, the user of your product, the one paying for your service. Design with empathy.

Why is this important? Nobody wants to start building a skyscraper on an unstable foundation. To stabilise your ground, you need to create a handcrafted experience for your users. Go to your users, get to know them, get to know them one by one. This is the only time you’ll ever be small enough to make something directly for them.

Create a product roadmap. Ask your customers for the roadmap. The roadmap often exists in the mind of the users you’re designing it for. Ask them what they’d like to experience. In fact, don’t just meet with your users, live with them. Literally start creating touch point by touch point.

Ask for feedback with every change. Passionate feedback is a sign that your product really matters to someone. One passionate user can turn into many, if you listen to them, and if they feel they’re being heard. User feedback ensures you’re guarding the very core of your business — the fact that you’re adding value or solving your customer’s problems.

To extract detailed feedback from users, ask for the product of their dreams. Not how to make it better (they’ll say something small). Ask what is something that will make them tell it to everyone they know. To draw out specific insights and understand what exactly is their 11/10 star experience, use a rating system. Start with 7/10, then 8/10, 9/10…Adding stars excites your users. To build something truly viral, you need to create something that creates a mindf**king experience. The kind of stuff that creates great experience. The Nirvana product.

Exercise judgement and discerning on the particular type of users and feedback you listen to. What works for one user may not apply to many other users. Ideas may or may not be feasible, but there will be a sweet spot you can find between designing the extreme and coming back to reality. You have to come back down to earth at some point.

Which part of the perfect experience do you scale? 
Work backwards. Find something that seems like magic, but still totally doable. Design the elements that help you build the totally doable thing. Build everything by hand. Until it’s painful. Then get help, like an intern, or something.

Automate tools to increase efficiency. Find out what’s the easiest thing to automate, but for the better. Eventually, create a system that does everything. Gradually work out a solution.

React to what users ask for. It gives your team the inspiration to build the feature that users really want. Patrick Collison, co-founder and CEO of STRIPE, paid close attention to users through a chatroom when Stripe was still a scrappy startup in its early days. People would come into the chatroom while they were sleeping and they wouldn’t get a respond. They then added a pager system. Frustrated users would page him at all hours. KAYAK, a search engine for the lowest available rates for flights/hotels used to provide a cellphone number as their customer service number.

Thoughtful founders will never say, “what a complete waste of time”. It’s the most creative period of their career. Kill your very few handful of customers with kindness.

The transition from the handcrafted phase to the massive scale phase is a challenging one. It requires two opposing mindsets, (1) you have to fully empathise with a single user, and at the same time (2) you have to worry about everyone.

Basically, the designing of the experience requires a different part of your brain from the one scaling the experience.

To design the experience — the brain acts in a way that is intuition-based, with human touch, it’s empathetic, thinks of the end-to-end experience. It’s the handcrafting phase, like writing.

To scale — the brain goes into an analytical mindset, where there is very little room for errors. It now acts more like an editor where it prunes, compacts, distills and architect.

Transitioning the handcrafted product to a scaled organisation who can now run it is tricky, because you get stuck in a messy system of bureaucracy. Now you need legal departments, management, communications, etc. Then you need to consider operating at a federal level. Every city is different. Go city by city. Hire people to deal with all these different issues.

It’s like a video game. You slay a dragon, you think you’ve completed the board game, but in the next level — multiple dragons appear.

When you’re busy slaying dragons, it’s hard to hold onto the handcrafted mindset. But it’s important to never let go of it completely, because that’s where the heart of innovation lies.

In a scaled organisation, antibodies exist against every single new handcrafted idea. It’s an automated response that protects organisational inefficiency. The natural reaction would be to say: It won’t operationalise. It won’t fit our process.

So, be extremely selective about which handcrafted innovation you choose and how you protect it organisationally. If you truly believe in it, you need to protect it. Because the natural reaction of the scaled organisation would definitely be to kill it.

To reinvent an industry, don’t look directly at that industry. Look at methodical industries. For Airbnb, they looked at travel and cinema industries.

To innovate within a scaled organisation, you have to switch from focusing on global concerns to zooming in on that one radical user again.

  1. Follow your user.
  2. Learn his pain points.
  3. Tell him you want to create the perfect product or service for him.
  4. Design an end-to-end experience that deeply moves him.

Then switch back to an analytical mindset and extrapolate from the single handcrafted journey the essential ingredients that you can apply on a macro level.

That was how Airbnb Trips came about. The inspiration came from the narrative of every movie — the Hero’s journey:

Character in ordinary world > character leaves ordinary world > character crosses over to a new magical world where obstacles happen > character overcome obstacles.

The Hero’s journey applied to Airbnb Trips:

Follow user > Finds out user needs a challenge from the ordinary world by day 2/3 > User has to step out of their comfort zone, because otherwise they do not remember the trip > User feel they belong while stepping out of their comfort zone > A transformation occurs in the user > A magical trip is created.

So, think small before thinking big. Spend time and effort indulging in the handcrafting experience. You’ll miss the times where you only have a handful of users. You’ll miss the handcrafted work. When you get bigger, your product changes less. So relish in the small moments and take advantage of the sub-scale to design the perfect experience, it’s when you experience the biggest and most innovative leaps.

Dream big, and act small.