A job may guarantee that you will get the result of a monthly paycheck. It’s often when you get into the business after working for some year in a job to ask for a guarantee. It’s your subconscious mind that always puts your focus back on it. As you may have already known where focus goes energy flows. Let me do this famous experiment with you right now. Don’t think of a pink elephant. You are already thinking about it. If you want to be an entrepreneur it’s one of the qualities to accept mistakes in public. Go tweet the below text. Share your good qualities.
Yes, I thought about a Pink Elephant.
Tweet
Let me explain to you why you should not chase guaranteed results. You kill the chance of possibilities. You approach any situation or problem with a fixed mindset. This makes you work with the constraints. Imagination has no constraints even when the resources are limited. The quick answer questions, the rush to conclude things, the need to justify your point, the hurry to finish the conversation, the race to win stupid games, the use of words that sounds like an attack, the means to shut your team down etc doesn’t work well when you are brainstorming, creative thinking or running a business.
The opposite of it may sound insane in terms of producing results like adding value, understanding the problem in detail, sitting with the problem for a longer period, learning to take calculated risks, giving free customer service, building a community, building a collaborative culture, investing in teams learning, giving autonomy to each team member, creating a vision for the company etc. None of the above guarantees results. You do them because they are the things you want to do, they are the things you like to do, they are the things you are proud to do. It’s your belief in them that shows off in your work, product and value you add to the world.
It gives you the ability to switch between tiny details and the big picture. It’s an idea of the infinite game and you are not playing to win. You are playing so that you can play it for as long as you can.
People like us (do things like this): For most of us, from the first day we are able to remember until the last day we breathe, our actions are primarily driven by one question: “Do people like me do things like this?”
We can’t change the culture, but each one of us has the opportunity to change a culture – our little pocket of the world.
The smallest viable market makes sense because it maximizes your chances of changing the culture. The core of your market, enriched and connected by the change you seek to make, organically shares the word with the next layer of the market. And so on. This is people like us.
from the book This is Marketing by Seth Godin
Vikram Shetty 