Pondering a Quote - 10 Strategies To Help You Not to Lose
Jetlagged and pondering.
"The amateur tries to win. The professional tries not to lose." - Nassim Taleb
Trying to Win and Not Lose are two different goals that demand two different mindsets. Both are important!
We have the intellectual complexity to hold and practice both, with more weight on the Not to Lose.
The objective is to avoid losses/risks that can make us fragile and kill us while increasing the chance to win big by accumulating small wins and building the capacity and muscles to win big.
Losing or failing is part of life; if we dont fail, we are not learning. But we dont need to fail big or fast to learn. We increase our chances of winning by consciously envisioning and thinking about how not to lose.
10 strategies to help me not to lose:
- Great mission and purpose
- Core values and principles to guide decision making
- A problem that is worth solving
1. Build strong foundations
2. Build a small core team, and use staff on demand as much as possible
Learn to do more with less. Hiring is expensive. Learning how to hire the right people is great leverage that can set you up for success. On-demand stuff is the new thing. You can hire any skill you need through services like Fiverr and Upwork.
3. Do NOT own – lease or subscribe instead
A lighter balance cheat is the way.
4. Build a portfolio of cheap experiment
Cloud, serverless, open source, etc., make it easy to build small and fast and then iterate
5. No one client should represent more than 15% of the overall revenue
Diversify.
6. Do premortem with the team often
Thinking about what could go wrong as a team is a great way to design a good product or service.
7. Hire interns
Smart people for very cheap, and possibly build a healthy talent pipeline.
8. Understand the implicit assumption and test them
9. Build a community
A community around a great mission or purpose is priceless. Your product or service roadmap will likely be in your community member's head.
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