INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Daniel TawfikContributorOften when I attend a conference or a networking event I am surprised by how many people operate at the periphery of
They boast of building a passive income from a web business, all while traveling the world as the rest of us mortals are slaving away at our
9-5 jobs.In a world where we are searching for silver bullets, these people seem to have amassed an arsenal of them
the 4-Hour Workweek, by Tim Ferriss
The book itself is not really the issue
Ferriss indeed outlines some interesting tips on managing resources to get the highest ROI on your work
antithetical to everything I know about entrepreneurship; a mindset that I see when I hear people talk about having an amazing idea that
they want to farm out to a young college student who can code, or outsourcing development of a product to a cheap dev house
connection they have, in lieu of a real distribution strategy
Neither are the number of coffee meetings you have scheduled or the amount of networking meetings you attend
These things are tertiary at best, and, at worst, just plain-old distractions.
Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without
expertise or the proper skills to execute. To be successful over the course of a career requires the application and accumulation of
This assumes that for any given undertaking you either provide expertise or you are just a bystander
startup is by nature a crash-course in developing expertise
What makes startups unique is the sheer dearth of resources
the startup is nothing more than a teacher
It, in fact, is a great teacher for no other reason than it demands the accumulation of knowledge quickly for the startup to survive.A
technical founder, whose experience may relegate her or him to a specialist role in a large company, for example, has to adapt and take on
more expertise in adjacent technical areas
whether that be sales, finance, marketing, management or design
these unknown territories and facing the headwind of startup challenges that it becomes clear that the startup is merely a force of
catalytic professional and character growth
With actual success of any given venture subject to the whim of outside forces, this growth is the non-monetary dividend that makes the
experience priceless.That is why the passive, 4-Hour Mindset is so self-defeating
Startup graveyards are full of visionaries without expertise or the proper skills to execute, for no other reason than ideas are not
self-executing, but are rather made into being by intense engagement by skilled operators.Most importantly, to think of a business as a
Startups fail withstanding founder expertise, of course
It is certainly not sufficient to be an expert
However, expertise does make it possible to traverse the struggles of creating businesses over the course of a career
expertise and the mindset of craftsmanship that allows someone like Elon Musk to jump from project to project and sector to sector with the
knowledge of how to execute on the highest-level problems
He is the epitome of an interdisciplinary student of his businesses.If you are to optimize for anything, optimize for the long-term
Use the challenges of your business today to build mastery in your craft
There is no guarantee that any one venture will succeed, but that mastery will bend luck in your favor over the long course of your career.
