Worry is a complete waste of time. No problem has ever been solved by worrying about it. It is like a rocking chair, it gives you something to do without taking you anywhere.
Problems can only be solved with rational thought and decisive action,Not Worry.
Nearly a century ago, author Dale Carnegie taught public speaking courses in New York city. There he noticed how much his students struggled with unproductive worry.
After learning a series of anti-worry techniques, he used his
public speaking courses as a labratory to test the techniques. For the next five years, students from Carnegie's class tested his anti-worry techniques, and reported their effects from it, back to the class.
There are many remedies to combat worry and start living more productively but there are three worry remedies
that Carnegie found to be particularly effective.
The first worry remedy will eliminate 90% of your worry. The second worry remedy will elminate 10% of your worry and
the third worry remedy will prevent worry from creeping back into your life.
Worry remedy #1
Anaylze your Worry:
When you are sick with worry, take a piece of paper and write down two questions, What am I worried about? and What can I do about it?
Take your time and describe your worry in precise detail, then write down the different courses of action you can take to eliminate your worry. Write at least three courses of action. Then decide which of these actions has the highest percentage of a positive outcome.
Experience has proven that 50% of your worry dissappears when you make a clear, definite decision regarding your worry, and 40% of your worry goes away when you carry out that decision. The more action you take, the more your worry will fade away.
Worry remedy #2
Accept the worst and improve it:
Now to get rid of the remaining 10% of your worry, all you have to do is imagine and accept that the worst case scenario has occured. What happens next? You still have your health, your future, maybe even your family. Think of the positive things that will stay in your life no matter the outcome of this worry. Now, collect your thoughts and know that this worry is not the end of everything.
By learning to live with the worst case scenario, this remedy has helped many people think clearly and find solutions
for the worry at hand.
Worry remedy #3
Live for today:
To eliminate future problems, we need to create a better today. Every morning when you wake up, wake like it's the
first day of your life. No yesterday's worry, only today's oportunities.
Carnegie says
'' The best possible way to prepare for tomorrow is to concentrate with all your intelligence, all your
enthusiasm, on doing today's work superbly today. That is the only possible way you can prepare for the future.''
When you know you have achieved what you set out to do today, today's worry won't be transferred to tomorrow. Do your best to take care of today, and tomorrow will take care of itself!
That was my take from the book. As always, I encourage you to read the book and let me know, how it helped you to stop worrying and start living.
When Josh Kaufman was a senior in collage, he accepted a job offer at P&G, to be an assitant brand manager. In this new position, he'd be working alongside people who had MBA degrees from top universities.
Josh didn't have an MBA and he couldn't justify going back to school to get an MBA and put himself in a massive student debt. So he wondered if there was a way he could master the fundamentals of business without getting
an MBA.
When he researched top business people that didnt have an MBA, he came across a brilliant business investor named
Charlie Munger.
Charlie Munger is the business partner of Warrent Buffet with whom he had developed the company
Bershire Hathaway into a $400 billion dollar business.
Munger doesn't have a formal business education. He is a meterologist and a lawyer from Omaha. Everything he knows
about business, he taught it to himself by analysing a latex work of mental moduls.
Josh was inspired by this and started reading hundreds of books on business. Slowy, he started noticing a pattern. He discovered that at the heart of every business, is a five part frame-work.
1. Value Creation
2. Marketing
3. Sales
4. Value Delivery
5. Finance
Josh says that without anyone of these parts, you don't have a business.
A venture that adds no value to others is a hobby.
A venture that doesn't have proper marketing is a flop.
A venture that doesn't sell the value it creates is a non-profit. A venture that doesn't deliver what it promises is a scam and A venture that does not bring in enough money to keep operating, will inevitably close.
Let's explore each part so we can better analyse a business and make better business decisions as an employee of the
business or as an enteprenuer thats trying to start a business.
1. Value Creation
When we create or sell something, we need to ask ourselves, are we creating something that people will actually pay for?
The first thing to figure out when starting a successful business is to understand what drives people to buy a service or product in the first place.
Two primary characteristics that drive buyers decisions are convienience and high-fidelity.
Convienience means a product being quick, reliable, easy and flexible. People always pay a premium for convienience. It's why departmental stores are so successful. You can get a whole range of products under one roof. A product maybe cheaper elsewhere else but because it's so convienient at a departmental store, people dont mind paying a little extra.
High fidelity means high aesthetic appeal, emotional impact or social status. An example of this is Apple computers.
People pay a premium for apple products because they love the way it makes them feel and it shows other people of
their status and choice.
Sometimes, a product can be convenient and have a high fidelity but people may still not buy the product. Hence, why a new product should always go through ''The Lean Startup'', (something I have covered in the last blog).
2. Marketing
The question we need to ask ourselves here is, ''How well are we attracting and holding our customers attention?''
When apple lauched the original I-pod, they told the world that this device would hold a thousand songs in your pocket.
This statement and idea was remarkable at the time and violated people's expectations. It made people pause and take notice of this new product. Any business that can hold the attention of their customers has a great chance of getting their customers to the third stage.
3. Sales
In the area of sales, we want to ask ourselves, '' How well do our customers believe and trust us?''
People are not going to give away their hard earned money unless they believe and trust the product. The best way to build belief and trust is to get social proof. The way businesses make customers trust them is to get an influential celebrity to advertise their product or getting 5 star reviews on Amazon, etc.
If a business cannot get social proof, it needs to perform on a consistent basis and be around long enough for
people to trust it. The more trust a business has, the more sales a business makes.
4. Value Delivery
The fourth part of every business is value Delivery. The question here is, ''Are we exceeding the expectation of our customers?''
Costumer expectations should be high enough to purchase your products but, let's say, after a customer purchased something, they got a coupon saying their next purchase would have a 10% discount, it would suprise the customer in a good way, since there was no mention of a discount and they were not expecting it. So your business performace has
exceeded the customers expectation. If your customer's expectation is exceeded, they will be satisfied and come back to buy again along with recommending your business to their friends.
Another way to exceed customer expectation is to have very good customer services. Make it convienient for your
customers to return products as well as exchange them.
5. Finance
Finally, we have to ask ourselves, ''Are we making more money than we are spending?''
If not, you need to reduce spending on one of the four above mentioned parts, or produce something of more value. Make sure your Incoming is more than your outgoing.
Josh says that at the end of the day, you are simply using numbers to decide whether or not your business is operating the way you intended.
Being a great business mind is not about knowing all the answers, it's about asking the right questions and having
the right mental models. With this five part frame work, you can ask the right questions and understand any business
and skip MBA school.
I hope you enjoyed this breakdown, and as always I suggest reading the book to get your own take and earn your own ''Personal MBA''.
In 2004, Eric Ries was a Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of a Silicon Valley start-up called imvu. IMVU's vision was to create a new online product that would allow users to build 3D avatars and interact with friends using their existing instant messaging network. Their product would combine two popular trends at the time.3D gaming and Instant Messaging.
However they grossly misjudged what their customers wanted and with complete confidence, put in crazy hours to complete their product.
On launch day, they eagerly waited for people to download their product but, No one was willing to download it. In an act of desperation, they invited target customers into their office and asked them questions, as they interacted with the product. It became obvious after a few interviews, that their basic assumption of what the customer actually wanted were completely wrong.
It turned out that people did not want to use existing instant messaging networks to invite their friends because they did not know if the product was cool or not. However people were willing to install a new instant messaging service that would allow them to talk to strangers using their 3D avatar. This meant Eric and his team had wasted a lot of time integrating existing messenging services like AOL and MSN among others into the product.
Eric was frustrated having wasted nearly 6 months of work, building something nobody wanted. But he was thankful for having learnt what his customers actually wanted before the company ran out of money.
However Eric couldn't help but wonder, did he really have to waste months of work to learn what his customers actually wanted? He quickly realised that the answer was ''No, of course not.'' He could have simply integrated one instant messaging network (and not the twelve that he did) and shown it to his customers, and learnt that no one wanted to use it.
Eric took a step back and saw that his approach to building an innovative product was fundamentally wrong. His focus should not have been on executing the perfect plan.
Rather, his focus should have been learning which of his plan was valuable to his end user in the least amount of time. Instead of relying on past experience, intuition or focus groups to determine, what he was doing was valuable, he should have been deploying ''Minimum Viable Product''.
A ''Minimum Viable Product'' or ''MVP'' is a product made with a minimal amount of effort, that is used to test specific assumptions, regarding the value of an idea. (don't worry it gets simpler to understand it when you read below)
Ries realised that in order to validate if an idea or project is useful for the end user, he had to follow a few steps, which would help him to understand if the product or idea would be a success and that is what Ries ended up doing.
1. User Experience Vision:
Firstly, an entrepreneur has to write down his vision for what the user will experience with the product, when the product is complete.
For eg: I have an idea of a new board game which is a combination of Monopoly and Risk. The game lets players go round the board, collecting properties while at the same time collecting an army to take down your opponent.
The first step in developing this product would be to come up with a brief step by step description of how the game is played. From the inital setup till the end of a single game.
2. Identifying Critical Assumptions:
Now that you have created your idea of the game, you can now tell your friends about it. Let's say, they absolutely loved it and they tell you that they will definetly buy your board game when you complete it. You maybe tempted to build it already but you must remember one critical assumption. Will your target audience actually buy the product? People can say they will buy something but when it comes to actually paying for it, many people tell a different story. Hence why we need the third step.
3. Build an early version to validate a critical assumption:
To test whether your customers will buy your product you will need to build an early version of it, so you know the response to it by the consumers.
The two most common ways to do this is to build:
a) a Concierge MVP or
b) a Smoke screen MVP.
The Concierge MVP is a manual method, which is quick and cheap to test an automated process. An example of this is the FIFA demo that is released every year.FIFA can test how many customers are actually buying or testing the product.
The Smokescreen MVP is about creating a front, or an illusion that you have a great product and it's at the final part of it's development. It's about marketing without a finished product and collecting pre-orders before you have a finished product. People do this by making animated videos, that talk you through the product or in this instance, our game.
4. Release and Measure:
In this step, it's time to show your MVP to a small segment of target cusotmers and then measure their behaviour. At this point in our board game example, we can buy a few ads on FB and target a small group of boardgame players. The advertisment will include the name of your game and a catchy sub-title and a link to your animated video, with the option to pre-order. After releasing your ad, you can measure the amount of clicks your ad gets vs a typical FB ad, or you can compare the average amount of people watching the videos and your number of orders.After allowing sometimes to measure this you can go to the next step...
5. Pivot or Persevere:
You can now decide to pivot or persevere based on the above steps. If your ad gets a lot of clicks but you don't get many pre-orders, it might be worthwhile to spend a bit more time tweaking the design of your boardgame.
However, if after a couple of retweaks you still don't get more than 2 or 3 pre-orders, it might be worthwhile to pivot to another boardgame strategy or an entirely different business idea.
Eric Ries says ''The sign of a successful pivot is that,these engine-tuning activities are more productive after the pivot than before.''
And that is it, now you can have all the ideas in the world and use the Lean Startup method to test which ideas are worth pushing forward and which require more improvements. I hope this breakdown was helpful and worthwhile your time. In the next breakdown I will be tackling ''The personal MBA'' by Josh Kaufman.
As always, I suggest you to read the book to get your own take from ''The Lean Startup''.
Welcome to the Breakdown. The series where I read and analyze various business, finance, self help and self development books to give you a small bite size of what I perceive is the core message of the author.
In this series I will cover various business books that will help and guide you to start your own business or startups with zero capital. Books on the various parts of a successful business and how you can access them to your advantage.
Books on investing at the right time and being a successful entrepreneur, as well as, a great leader.Books that cover the entire course of an MBA. Books on how you can make friends, stop worrying and live a rich inner and outer life.
It all sounds overwhelming but that's what we are here to do, and just like any other enterprise, we are going to take it one step at a time.
Of course, you are more than welcome to buy the book (actually, I would encourage it) and let me know about your own interpretation of what the author intended to teach us in the books. So without further ado, let's get started...
