MythConceptions Part 2 - Shoot for the Moon

“It is better to take many small steps in the right direction than to make a great leap forward only to stumble backward” ― Old Chinese Proverb



As the pandemic has taken a toll on the mental health of everyone across the globe, I believe this would be a good time to research how our decision making affects us at a neurological level.

One of the most significant factor of a person’s success is their mindset. In popular culture, we are constantly instructed to have a positive mindset but research on the chemistry of our brain might suggest otherwise.

I have seen many social media influencers telling people that the way to turn your grand vision into reality is to have a positive mindset in business. We are often told, “Shoot for the moon. Even if you miss, it you will land among the stars”. This might turn out to be a counterproductive strategy based on the research shared below.

Let’s dive into the details of how good and bad decisions affect us on a neural level and how each one of us can better manage our neuro-chemistry.



Dopamine

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter which plays a key role in how we feel pleasure. It affects many parts of our behaviour and physical functions such as Learning, Motivation, Focus, Attention and what we find interesting.

While having greater amounts of dopamine can raise our inspiration and determination, lower levels of dopamine could become the source of lower ambition.

Why is this information important? In short, build a small business that you are sure you can pull off and only then should you move onto something bigger.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Some fascinating experiments on rats have revealed very interesting results of the effects of induced dopamine.

There is a classic research where researcher put two rats in a tube and the tendency is for them to try and push the other one out. One always wins and pushes the other out. One who gets pushed out is termed “Loser” and the one who is pushed out is termed “Winner”. Here are the interesting things about this. Firstly, The Winner will tend to win other battles simply because it won the time before. The Loser by losing will tend to lose. This is where it gets really interesting. You can take a rat and push it from behind and make it a winner and on subsequent trials where you are not pushing it, it will tend to win more often. So the win doesn’t even have to come from itself.

Matthew Fuxjager did a similar research on the California mouse. He showed that if you set up a contest and you weaken the opponent of a certain mouse by drugging it, that mouse, simply by virtue of winning that contest was more likely to win the subsequent contest against a bigger mouse.

The surge of dopamine & testosterone creates new receiving station in your brain to receive more of the same chemicals. So the next time you are in a contest, the same amount of dopamine & testosterone is created in your brain because now there are more receivers in your brain. This makes you more aggressive and more motivated. Winning induces dopamine & testosterone which helps us in winning again.

A very interesting real life story by Trevor Moawad about a magazine entrepreneur shows us a real life example of how an induced win can help us achieve success.

A top magazine entrepreneur gave a speech at ToastMasters. He was a spoiled High school student, struggling to pass, and was about to get kicked out. In the 1980’s, he was to take his SAT exam. He promised his mom he would take the test and expects nothing. He takes the test in May, gets the results in June. He scored a whopping 1480 out of 1600! His Mom asked, “Did you cheat? You must have cheated.” This was not in alignment who he was. He said he tried to cheat, but the spacing of chairs were too far, number 2 pencil too small to see the markings. He couldn’t cheat. “All I know is I took the test.”

From then on, he was weaponized to be smart. He goes to class and doesn’t hang out with the same people. Teacher’s see the difference. He goes to a 4 year college, then goes on to an Ivy League school. Becomes one of the most successful magazine entrepreneurs in the world. The story could be that had gifts, but he never unlocked them until the SAT…

…12 years later, he received a letter from Princeton in New Jersey. Doesn’t think much about it, but one day he opens it. The SAT board periodically reviews their test taking procedures and policies. He was 1/13 people sent the wrong SAT score. His actual score was 740/1600.

“People want to say it’s the 1480 that changed my life, but acting like a 1480 changed my life. And what does a 1480 do? They go to class.”



Optimizing Brain Chemistry for Success

This is how important our mindset can be. More importantly, how do we consciously develop our mindset that can help us in achieving our goals.

Nietzsche claimed—now a cliché—that what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.

While everyone is going to fail at some point in their life, optimizing yourself to try and hit a goal that is too far-fetched is definitely not a good strategy. It will only make you less ambitious.

For your very first startup, always pick a business that you are sure you can pull off, then move on to the next one.

An increase in dopamine gives us a pleasurable feeling. By signaling the brain cells that they have hit jackpot, dopamine signals the cells to keep on doing what led to the success.

When you win at something, there is a surge in testosterone and dopamine. As these chemicals subsequently increase overtime with each success, the neurological structure is altered which makes you smarter, more confident and more likely to succeed in future. Biologists call it the “Winner Effect”

Similarly, when we fail, there is a decrease in dopamine and testosterone which makes us more likely to fail again. Setting unrealistic goals or excessive goals at once can be an ineffective strategy if we wish to harness the power of your neurological reward centre. Failure can create a sense of powerlessness which can be disastrous.

According to Dr. Ian Robertson, Even thinking about a time when you had power increase your testosterone which in turn has the following effects:

1. Strategic Vision

2. Decisive

3. Appetite for risk

4. Handle stress well

5. Smart

6. Upbeat, bold and inspiring



Powerlessness, on the other hand, even remembering when someone else had power over you has the opposite effects.

Pick a target you can hit and then hit it. Collect wins no matter how small. It is better for the brain. If you do this long enough, you will modify your brain chemistry which will make you more likely to succeed in the future.

“Success begets success.

I've been offered a lot of movies now that '30 Rock' has been successful.” ― Alec Baldwin

MythConceptions Part 1 - Entrepreneurs are Risk Takers

"If passion drives you, let reason hold the reins." ― Benjamin Franklin



In this time of crisis, all of us have been pondering on many important questions of our life. The silver lining of this pandemic is the opportunity to think, research and evaluate the choices we will make in our life once this crisis is over.

I think this might be a good time for entrepreneurs to review the basic understanding of some principles about entrepreneurship that we regularly see on the mainstream media.

I am going to be exploring some famous myths of entrepreneurship. I will be examining academic research, analyzing the effects of the particular myth along with some famous real life examples that we all can relate to.



Are Entrepreneurs Risk Takers?

Like most people, I always thought of an entrepreneur as someone who risked it all to pursue their passion no matter what the cost. Someone who sacrifices all kinds of comfort for their passion. Someone who quits their job, sleeps 5 hours a day on a couch, works from a garage and eats at cheap places to make their ends meet all in the name of devotion and commitment to their passion. They risk-it-all without any security or backup plan right? As the popular saying goes “an entrepreneur is someone who jumps off a cliff and builds a plane on the way down”

Well, turns out, this is one of the biggest myths out there. Why this myth persists is still a question that needs to be answered but nonetheless, most of us acknowledge this myth. Probably because it’s a lot more thrilling to tell that story. Maybe we love to idolize the exceptional people who drop out or go broke to realize their dreams. It also gives us an excuse to not be that person. Looking at the life of someone like Bill Gates, we can say ‘he left Harvard, I could never do that,’ leaving out a huge part of the story (that I will come back to, at the very end of this analysis).

When I was first exposed to the notion of entrepreneurship, I couldn’t help but feel quite fearful to the fact that you would have to risk your stability and go all-in if you wish to be successful. I always thought about how entrepreneurs take care of their basic necessities? What happens if they get really sick? What if a friend or family member needs their help? What if it doesn’t work out like they planned? What happens to the failed entrepreneurs?

I came to the conclusion that maybe successful entrepreneurs are just wired differently. These people don’t feel the same way normal people do and maybe I need to stop worrying about all these things and just jump in.



Well, SUCCESSFUL ENTREPRENEURS ARE NOT RISK-TAKERS!



Take a moment to think about these three examples before we dive deep into the topic:

1. Sara Blakely: She gets the idea of footless pantyhose. She doesn’t leave her job to go all in. She keeps her job for two years. In a few years, she creates her own company “Spanx” and becomes the youngest self-made billionaire

2. Markus Persson: A programmer who liked to create games as a hobby. He release his own game in 2009 but instead of risking it all, he keeps his day job for an entire year before he decides to commit full-time to his own game. Minecraft later becomes one of the best-selling game of all time and he would sell it for $2.5 Billion.

3. Steve Wozniak: Inventor of the Apple I computer. He starts a company with Steve Jobs in 1976. Surprisingly, instead of taking a huge risk, he kept his full time engineering job at Hewlett-Packard for a whole year while working on apple at the same time. “I still intended to be at that company forever,” Wozniak reflects.



These examples are just the tip of the ice-berg. Recreating the steps of successful people has always been a momentous task. A lot of variables play out different results in various different circumstances. We might as well learn something that may be completely contrary to popular belief if we could only study these people during their journey towards success.

In 2014, Joseph Raffiee and Jie Feng published a research in the Academy of Management Journal. In their research they as the question: How keeping a day job influences an entrepreneur’s rate of survival?

In their research, they tracked a group consisting of over five thousand people who became entrepreneurs. The study stretched for almost 14 years and the results showed the exact opposite of the common belief that successful entrepreneurs are risk taker. Contrary to popular belief, the study concluded that the entrepreneurs who did not quit their jobs had 33% lower odds of failure than those who did quit.



Now that we have an academic backing, let us take a look at this in accordance with some simple business sense.

“Opportunities come infrequently. When it rains gold, put out the bucket, not the thimble.” This quote is from "Warren Buffet", one of the most successful businessmen in the world right now. According to Warren, the most successful businesses are those which optimize for the long term. Now think about this: 

Strategic decisions are at the very core of creating a successful company . Your financial and emotional support is the most important thing your business needs at its initial stage. This way you can make thoughtful decisions and wait for the right time and right opportunity to grow your business. Stability (keeping a day job) will help you make rational long-term decisions. If you follow the media and quit you job, your weak financial state will force you to take bad shot-term decisions and ultimately handicap your business.



Now that we have established an argument based on some analysis, let’s dissect some famous real life examples of successful personalities in order to properly bust this myth:

1. T.S. Elliot: A Nobel Prize winner in poetry. After publishing one of his most successful work “The Waste Land”, Elliot kept his Bank Job for three years, rejecting the idea of taking a huge risk by going all in. Even afterwards, he only switched his job to provide stability in his life. He would go on to keep this job for the next 40 years, writing poetry in the side.



2. Pierre Omidyar: After creating an online marketplace in his free time, he would keep working as a computer programmer for nine months until he started earning more from eBay than his job.



3. Henry Ford: Employed under Thomas Edison. It was only after he was promoted to chief engineer that he had enough time and money that he was able to start his automotive empire. His job gave him the monetary safety essential to try out his innovative ideas for a car. Even after he built a carburetor and earned a patent for it, he still went on working his daily job for a year.



4. Larry Page and Sergey Brin: Although, these Google founders worked out how to radically improve how the internet search worked in 1996, they did not want to leave their Ph.D. at Stanford until 1998. “We almost didn’t start Google,” Page says, because "we were too worried about dropping out of our Ph.D. program.” At one point in 1997, they even tried to sell their company saying that Google was disturbing their research and studies. Lucky for them, the buyer rejected the offer of $2 million.



5. John Legend: One of the few people to win an Emmy, Tony, Grammy & Oscar, his first album was released in 2000. Instead of going all in, John kept working as a consultant at his day job while performing in his spare time at night.



6. Stephen King: Described as the “King of Horror”, he worked as a teacher, janitor, gas pump attendant and an industrial worker for almost seven years after writing his first story. He had written 3 novels before “Carrie” but “Carrie” was the first one to get published. He decided to go all-in after Carrie was published which sold almost thirty thousand copies.



7. Brian May: He co-founded Queens in 1970 while he was doing his Ph.D. in astrophysics. He didn’t drop out until four years later to go all in with Queens. He would go on to compose “We Will Rock You”



And what about Bill Gates, celebrated for dropping out of Harvard to start Microsoft? In his second year at Harvard, Gates sold a new software. He would avoid going all in so soon. He would stay at Harvard for one more year. Even then he would not risk it all by dropping out, instead, he would apply for a leave of absence to be formally approved by the university so that he may come back to resume his studies should Microsoft fail. He balanced his risk portfolio by getting an approved leave of absence from Harvard – and by having his parents bankroll him. “Far from being one of the world’s great risk takers,” entrepreneur Rick Smith notes, “Bill Gates might more accurately be thought of as one of the world’s great risk mitigators.”



These facts may be eye-opening for many because according to the media, successful entrepreneurs love risk. The fact that these stories are not told in their entirety on mainstream media still needs to be answered. I implore you to watch this Ted Talk on why Adam Grant left the opportunity to invest in a billion dollar startup “Warby Parker”. Adam has since researched this topic extensively and he went on to write his bestselling book “Originals” which was the main inspiration behind this blog post.

The takeaway is simple: The more risk-averse you are, the better entrepreneur you can become.



“Many entrepreneurs take plenty of risks – but those are generally the failed entrepreneurs, not the success stories.”  

― Malcolm Gladwell

Just get it done - What I learned after wasting 90 days on trying to build the perfect product

"Done is better than perfect" — Sheryl Sandberg


Before I left my job, I thought we were going to build this product and it's going to be fantastic. As soon as I left my job, we started working on the product from the very next day. Trying to make it the most useful yet extremely economical. We just knew that the product was going to be so perfect, it will have all the desirable qualities needed. We started designing and working on the best procurement strategies. A few weeks later, we had a few new ideas that we wanted to incorporate into our product. This was going to make it even more useful and people are just going to fall in love with it. It is an improvement of the product we were initially thinking of making.

3 months go by and we find out about a completely new material that is unique and better than anything in the market currently. So we think like this "If we are going to make a product, it should be perfect. Why waste money and time on inferior products when we could make a much better product. We just need to work on souring the new materials and change the design a tiny bit.

I look back and think, we have designed, we have innovated, re-innovated and re-re-innovated to make the best product we possibly could But we still don't have a product. The moment we reach fabrication is when we get a new idea on how to improve it further and we think why not make the perfect product?

That is when I land upon the "Cult of Done Manifesto" and it all makes sense. As the 8th point of manifesto "Laugh at Perfection" clearly defines the state of "Limbo" we were in. Perfection is a Limbo and it will cripple you. Do stuff and revisit for improvements only after it is completed.

The whole idea of this manifesto it to get things done. In layman term "get stuff done, get more stuff done, get even more stuff done". So, if you are an entrepreneur, or you wish to be one. This is an important point to keep in mind. "Done is the engine of more"

"Have no fear of perfection - you'll never reach it" — Salvador Dali

The Cult of Done Manifesto

1. There are three states of being. Not knowing, action and completion.
2. Accept that everything is a draft. It helps to get done.
3. There is no editing stage.
4. Pretending you know what you’re doing is almost the same as knowing what you are doing, so just accept that you know what you’re doing even if you don’t and do it.
5. Banish procrastination. If you wait more than a week to get an idea done, abandon it.
6. The point of being done is not to finish but to get other things done.
7. Once you’re done you can throw it away.
8. Laugh at perfection. It’s boring and keeps you from being done.
9. People without dirty hands are wrong. Doing something makes you right.
10. Failure counts as done. So do mistakes.
11. Destruction is a variant of done.
12. If you have an idea and publish it on the internet, that counts as a ghost of done.
13. Done is the engine of more.

Mentors: The shortcut we all need

This is a video of a clothing sale.

I believe we will be successful when we show the same hunger to learn and run after mentors.

“Good artists copy, great artists steal”  —  Pablo Picasso

Our ability to copy is the biggest predictor of success. Therefore, choosing a mentor in business and in life, is one of the most important decisions we will ever make. Mentoring is a key element in career development and some of the most successful people in history had mentors:

• Alexander the great had Aristotle as his mentor
• Albert Einstein had Max Talmey as his mentor
• Bill Gates had Paul Allen as his mentor

Most of us miss out on this idea and we lose a good part of our life making bad decisions. Mentors are the shortcut we all want. Mentors will help us achieve our goals quicker if we can learn from their experiences and avoid the same mistakes they made. It is also worth mentioning that the people of knowledge (mentors) will not come to us but we must show the hunger and go to them.

“Show me a successful individual and I’ll show you someone who had real positive influences in his or her life. I don’t care what you do for a living—if you do it well I’m sure there was someone cheering you on or showing the way. A mentor.” — Denzel Washington