Risk is the fear of losing something. Calculated risk is knowing the probability of losing and acting. Mitigating risk is decreasing the probability of losing. Taking risk is managing your fear of losing something.
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Category: entrepreneurship
Doing 10x efforts require a lot of patience and control to not do 1x or 0.5x things. And there has never been any clear playbook to do 10x. To do 10x, you have to only set goals you see as 10x and only do tasks that have medium or high impact to these 10x things. Framework to achieve such is very simple.
- Define your goals or KPIs you want to follow. Minimum you should do is next quarter goals or KPIs you are chasing
- Create tasks in each such goals and tag each task with impact and complexity. There can be 3 levels of impact – high, medium and low. There can be 3 level of complexities – easy, medium and hard
- High impact tasks are ones that directly contribute to the goal, medium impact is ones that contribute to something that directly contributes to these goals. Low impact tasks are ones where there is no clear visible impact that can be derived towards goals or impact is 5-6 hops away.
- Easy complexity are tasks that can be done in less than a day, medium are ones which takes 1-3 days, hard are ones which will take more than a week.
- Set timelines for each last task which will be achieved in the goal as a week before the end of the quarter.
- Now set timelines for each task so that its easy to understand what tasks need to be achieved every week.
- Do weekly planning by the above mode. Make sure you pick high impact, easy or medium tasks, and not low impact, hard tasks. If you have a high impact, hard tasks – divide them into medium or easy tasks.
And finally, God Speed! Let me know if you need any help in framework prioritization. I have started using notion.so and have templatized project management by the above philosophies already there, happy to help. Feel free to reach out over para[dot]arora[at]gmail
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Employee Feedbacks
There are a lot of actions happening in the company, by people. People are just faces and never judge people or try to classify people. People keep growing or changing. Just keep seeing their actions and make remarks about actions, never people. Eventually, accountabilities are defined by groups of actions or directions of actions which are needed and they are grouped in such a way that logically it makes sense that since they are interrelated, it’s easier to find in a single person or a single person can grow to doing those set of actions defining a role for accountability. If they are not able to do all such actions as a collective single individual, either they are in the wrong seat or organization has misjudged all such action capabilities can be one individual and need to remove or divide them into more grouped accountability or roles. Whatever you do or practice, remember always to give direct feedback about the actions of people (oh, and never miss giving feedback) and never to the character of people or generalizing a human.
A successful pre-seed raise sets a lot of foundation for the eventual success of the organization. I will stay away from feedbacks of startups who conclude and are convinced that money is just money and just take it and quickly raise the round. That’s the worst thing one could do from the investor side or startup side (But when you have to do it, you do it especially at tough times knowing it might be on an ideal situation). Following are the conversation traits which should be happening in seed investors to make sense of the eventual success of the whole exercise:
Brutal facts confrontations
Are your investors talking about the brutal facts with you and how open you are discussing them? You can be a subject expert or have years of experience in your domain, but if your investor is not able to challenge you with brutal facts, you probably are going to have a hard time in your fundraising as well as have a hard time deriving great value from them. Some investors can be nice to you and really want to invest in your startup whatever you are doing, but look for traits that challenge you and force you to think, go back for homework and get back with a plan.
Do you get irritated by such confrontations or tend to ignore such investors, you probably should reconsider your decision of leading an organization and probably take some NLP course or something to help yourself before you dive into your journey.
Startups that have survived and will survive aren’t the ones that are just created based on a market opportunity. They are created by passionate individuals who have envisioned the world after a few years and know a path to go there carrying their values and articulating mission to create the perfect vision they have created.
Their current app or idea or product is not the business but an accelerator to achieve the mission. We have an interesting time right now with markets hinting a crash and excited to see startups who will do the tests of the time.
Human beings are instinctively social creatures. Social media apps, largely since Facebook, have categorically tapped into some basic elements of social interaction, and brought it into cyberspace; and it is for this reason that they’re some of the largest and most influential companies in the world – and hence also some of the most ubiquitous, publicised, and scrutinised.
Social media, in general, lays its groundwork on some basic socio-psychological phenomena, which we should certainly keep in mind if we wish to create the next big thing in this space;
Acceptance, and sense of belonging
For the most part, people are largely driven by their need to belong. Our need for social acceptance is very high, and it manifests in various ways, eg.
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Want to be an idea machine?
Want to be an athlete? Run everyday. And be disciplined about it.
Want to be a great musician, play music everyday.
Want to learn things in your life, read an hour everyday
Want to be an idea machine?
Pick ANY topic / problem and write 5-10 ideas on that EVERY DAY. I do that everyday and consider myself a great idea machine. Be that, all you need is just to decide what you want to be and spend time everyday on that. Picking ANY IDEA has another advantage, good ideas are generally produced when different ideas have sex which each other. Thinking on variety of things will broaden your horizon.
PS: I use Google calendar goals to achieve my goals.
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Have goals…
Hard work without goals is like players with no score to make. Have goals. And have goals not just for success, have goals to be the person what is needed to achieve those goals. Goals are just inspirations to be that guy/girl.
Have goals to wake up with the excitement for the day, and not with catching up on pending things to do. Hard work is no measure of success. Run, but in the right direction. Have time for strolling, but stroll when you want to stroll and have set aside a time to do that.
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Productive Idea Flow
Productive Idea flow is when ideas keep on building over each other. You arrive at a good idea which is improvement over your current product and spend some time visualising how everything will look and work if that idea is implemented. Then in that state you imagine yourself there and try to find another improvement. This improvement is your next idea built over previous increment. This incremental ideas work over each other to create a new innovative disruptive idea.
e.g. In your thoughts imagine creating a light bulb, then LED, television, computer, mobile etc etc all just by a bulb.
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Being successful
A very noble thought has come to a mind today – lets be successful. The only problem is the mind does not know what is being successful. Lets drill down to what is being successful.
Being successful really means doing things which you really want to do and more importantly not doing things which you don’t want to do. It is very much linked to being happy for success overall is achievement of happiness only. Note that much emphasis should be given on not doing things which you don’t want to do. Doing things for most is an infinite ongoing list.
Its very common to associate money with being successful. I am not denying it is not, the only role of money is “money buys you resources which can be bought and which you can not do” as well as “buy resources and time which you want to do“. That explain the role of money.
Now the most important factor apart from role of money is when money does not play a part in success. e.g., you want to be fit, control an addiction, wake up early etc. In fact surprisingly, most of the time money actually becomes your enemy in becoming successfully.
So now when we know what being successful is, lets try being one.
What is your list of things you want to do and more importantly things you don’t want to do.