Startup Success Secrets: Why Action Beats Planning Every Time
Why having an action bias is one of the best ways to succeed
Procrastination and deliberation have been a curse to much of humanity for as long as we have existed. We tend to sit on ideas and try to figure out every detail about projects before we begin.
We like to imagine how things will pan out in years to come before we even take a step in that direction.
“What will my life be like if I start this business”
“Imagine how cool it would be to become a famous author”
We love to look at the imaginings of the final results of work we have yet to put in. But by doing this, the scale of the work becomes unbelievably high.
The thought of having to write and edit an entire book, meet with publishers, find cover designers and come up with an actual story seems like too much so we give up and don’t do the work.
Building the business, hiring employees and getting clients seems too far removed from reality and so it becomes too frightening to actually do something so instead we just freeze and do nothing.
But there are a select few who do not suffer from this. And these are the people who become successful and build the world we live in.
The action takers.
This is who you should try to become if you want to succeed.
Write a page before writing the whole book. See how the story unravels as you write instead of trying to plan the whole thing out and becoming overwhelmed. Revisions will have to come at some point anyway so write now and refine later.
Don’t imagine yourself running a company with hundreds of employees, just find a problem that you can solve and begin working on it. If that’s a product, make the first prototype, if it is a service that you can help other businesses with, reach out and provide that proposal to how you can help them. Figure out the admin and hiring of employees after you start making money.
Many of the biggest companies in the world are tech companies and many of these companies, of course, began as startups. And one of the defining factors which make startups successful is their ability to act fast.
To throw things at the wall, see what sticks and if something doesn’t, not panic but instead find out how to pivot quickly. And not get too hung up on previous failures.
This bias towards doing things instead of planning things allows you to get much further than your competition because it allows you to learn so much more and utilise those lessons you learn more effectively.
But there is a caveat to this. You have to be able to actually learn from your mistakes. Often, people make the same mistakes hundreds of times and just hope that the result changes. Which is what Einstein believes is the definition of insanity.
But you have to be able to find what does work, use that, and then change everything that doesn’t.
But this action bias only works for some time and there is a point when you need to stop and stick to what works.
I worked for a company some time ago which taught me the value of action. We operated at an unbelievable speed, getting more done in a day than most people would get done in a week. It was incredibly stimulating and allowed for lots of growth, and helped me realise that failure wasn’t as damning as I thought it was, with probably 80% of the actions we took being “failures” but having the other 20% be so successful that it outweighed the failures tremendously.
This helped me change my mindset and stop worrying so much about planning and being a perfectionist.
And it worked very well when this company was a startup, but this company had existed for almost 10 years and could no longer be considered a startup.
And we often “innovated” ourselves in circles.
Because we would pivot from ideas which were working to ones which made no sense, and then when that didn’t work we would go back to the original idea having lost a great deal of progress which we could have maintained by just sticking to the idea in the first place.
This happened all the time, from distribution platforms, to design, to company structure. Management couldn’t sit still and constantly wanted things to be disrupted which caused lots of employee resentment.
There was also a saying that the founder of the company used to throw around regarding how he wanted our work to be: “Cheap and nasty” because he believed in quantity over quality.
This may have been beneficial at some point, but when things are working, and there is an audience of people who believe in our products. people need to be able to sit still and continue with what is working and improve the quality so that it is no longer “cheap and nasty”. And avoid shiny object syndrome.
It is detrimental to always change.
Using the previous example of the author. If the story changes in ways while writing that the writer didn’t expect, like a character's personality gaining more depth. it would be beneficial to pivot with this in mind and adapt the story to fit these changes. But, if the book is finished it wouldn’t make sense to throw it out and write a new book instead, or start a podcast instead of getting it published. Which just leaves you right where you started again.
So learn to adapt and take quick action, but when things begin to stick. Learn to refine and improve and no longer chase the shiny object.
Godspeed.