Rationale on being Average

Yesterday I wrote an article about Being Average. Now here is the rationale behind it. Normally when you reach a certain stage or have a breakthrough in the income you tend to chase perfection or social validation. We stop making more income and start adding more work to life. Take a minute and think about it.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. Not all progress is created equal.

effortless by Greg Mckeown

So the rationale here is once you achieve anything with your strength you try to learn new skills in the opposite spectrum. Let’s take a real example. It’s my story about 7-8 years back when I left my job to enter into business. In my initial days, I left a good-paying job in order to gain a high paying software consulting business. Since it was a direct work with a London based company the conversion was good and the risk was less.

Our Client and currently our Mentor Carlos gave a piece of very interesting advice to both of us. I would like to learn from you if you can create an output with less work and effort because that would mean we would do the same work in half the time and invest our time in upgrading our skills or product. This sounds so simple and is so aligned with the way we work. We had already shown some examples to him how we can reduce the effort and thus bill the clients less.

Business of Being Average

Let’s say we would have applied the theory of being average and set a target of 3 years here are some decisions I would have made and some anticipated results we would have got (remember this is a thought experiment, wake your imagination)

1. Instead of hiring one person should have hired two
2. Started reading blogs about small software business
3. Getting to know about diffrent pricing models of SaaS
4. Writing blogs about improving coding effeciency. I had my blog vikramshetty.com back then with diffrent weblink
5. Creating a Digital curiculam for Student and teach it to our college and local colleges
6. Share about some breakthroughs from our clients on LinkedIn
7. Create Knowelge based on the learning and scientifically apply to all the work we do
8. Create an assest libary on Youtube or vimeo for future team members
9. Plan to rewamp the marketing website and try some google ads or SEO
10. Learn more about our clients and the sustainability space we are in
11. Implemented on of my favouraite book E-Myth

Possible Results

1. We would have had some pricing strategy to double our income.
2. Ther would have been a community of software developer of around 500+ reading our insights
3. Our team would have been equipped with 2X performance with the tools and technique we would have developed
4. We would have got step by step systems in place for anyone associated with us to double thier productivity
5. We would have 2X the impact of our software and its outcome to our clients.

What did we do?

We chased the money, took the side project in the beginning but later stopped, studied all the big companies, attended the startup community talks, attended random business talks, did not spend time working on the business, worried more about our personal finance and how much we take home, didn’t talk about taking calculated risks, did business like a job, avoided difficult conversation, didn’t learn how to overcome conflicts, didn’t worked on complex coding problems like performance, memory management, microservices, better user experiences, multi-tenant, cloud computing, clean code architecture, test coverage, Design Patterns, OOP, introducing machine learning etc, Expecting answers to come from outside, Looking for different mentors, not putting simple strategy at work, running like the headless chicken, not having deeper meaning full conversation, not trying to take help of our client, trying to hide our incompetency and vulnerability, and the list goes on.

You must read this long rant because it’s true.

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