power of random meetings

Meeting people randomly has really taken a plunge lately, in part due to the pandemic. Offices and co-working spaces are typically fertile grounds for random meetings but less frequented due to work-from-home initiatives.

Sometimes, the people with whom you strike up a conversation on the street or public transport might turn out to be great business connections. You might be one conversation away from meeting someone who knows someone who could provide a breakthrough for your business.

Random meetings are of a dying breed. Most of our (new) connections are artificially brokered through social media.

Say hello every now and then to strangers.

success requires no explanation

“Success requires no explanation; failures must be doctored with alibis.” That’s what Napoleon Hill said. In my mind, that translates to explaining how success came to be, in hindsight, is easy. However, a multitude of factors undeniably played a role in achieving success—timing and location, among many others. Failure, on the other hand, is equally easy to explain. Post-rationalizing everything that went wrong, coming up with an explanation and excuse at the same time.

One is, however, more honest than the other. At least, if you take away the blaming aspect from explaining the failure. For instance, the product failed because the customers were too stupid to understand how to use the product. Considering that the market is always right, externalizing the blame doesn’t provide a fertile environment where learning opportunities are plentiful. In short, the product maker was too stupid and arrogant to make a product customers wouldn’t be able to understand.

Why is explaining success sometimes dishonest? Because the need for rationalization is smaller. Both from an internal and external point of view.

When people fail, we try to look for answers within to make peace or amends. Other times, the outside world demands explanations.
When people succeed, the need for answers is reduced.

Success to me is understanding failure, without blaming anything or anyone, on the one hand, combined with understanding, rationally, why success manifested itself on the other hand.

fixed flexibility

I’m slightly allergic to the following crap: follow these five steps so you, too, can have a magical morning. Activities such as reading, meditation or praying, working out all can make your morning more magical.

However, what none of these pieces of advice seem to entail are the more mundane things. What about washing up, eating, getting dressed, helping others in the household get dressed, traveling to work, the list goes on…

One of my biggest pieces of advice is; include a flexible component.

I find a plan to be only as good as its flexibility. Returning to the morning routine example. One of the activities on the planning should be; a wildcard. After all, you never know what’s going to happen. Suppose you are overcome with sadness due to the inability to complete all items on your list. What then is the purpose of the routine?

What’s true of morning routines is also true of businesses.

Taking the Pareto principle into account, include gaps, breathing space, or wildcards in your planning. Complement fixed components with flexible ones.

only tranquility

One of the favorite sayings of my (foster) dad must be, loosely translated, “only tranquility can save you.”

Stress is the way of our cardiovascular system to prepare for something to come. Heart rate increases, blood pressure rises, adrenaline proliferating from your gut into every muscle.

A gift of mother nature. Something potentially stressful coming up? No problem. Let me heighten your awareness and temporarily increase your reaction speed.

Stress, appropriately applied, helps us. It’s just that that applying stress properly, in a beneficial way, is tremendously difficult.

Keeping your composure is required to think clearly throughout a stressful situation.

short term toxicity

Positions are held increasingly shorter. Whether those positions be stock trades or jobs… In the past couple of decades, the average position held has decreased significantly in duration.

It’s tough for humans to think beyond our lifetimes. Worse, sometimes it’s even hard to think beyond the next couple of years. Politicians often aim for short-term gains within their tenure, neglecting long-term results.

There are no quick get rich schemes. Once more, for the people in the back, there are no quick get rich schemes.

There is smart work and perseverance. The ability to see it through and the willingness to put in work, lot’s of it. That’s it.

expert paradox

Either you’re an expert, or you’re not. The shades of grey seem to be continuously reduced until we’re left with only black and white.

When somebody dedicates their life, academically and professionally, to a particular subject matter, chances are they’ll grow to become, or already are, an expert. Subsequently, they should be respected as such.

On the other hand, everybody is entitled to an opinion. No more, no less. You are entitled to an opinion, but the world doesn’t owe you anything. If your opinion is in no way backed by science, it’s just that, an opinion.

Sometimes a naive and humble approach or input can shed new light on a complex problem. However, due to the immediate dismissal of such input, the gap seems to be increasing. Either you’re a nitwit or an expert. Leaving no room for moderation and transferable knowledge from one domain into another.

future value

Upon establishing that; something of value isn’t necessarily commercially viable, and vice versa, two questions beg themselves. On the one hand, how does one make value commercially viable, or the other way around, how does one increase the intrinsic value of something that’s already commercially viable? That’s rather practical. On the other hand, how has the entrepreneur’s – and their customers’ world changed, once the above condition falls into place?

Entrepreneurship is (among many other things) having a clear vision of the future, the path towards it, how to bridge the period in-between, and how to anticipate the vision manifesting itself.

think outside the book

Investing (time) in acquiring more knowledge into the domain in which you operate is always beneficial. Reading books, magazines, blogs, papers on your subject is a surefire way to increasing knowledge.

In an attempt to think out of the box, consuming reading material from a fundamentally different domain (as opposed to the one in which you operate) can expand your oculus.

Think outside the book. At least outside of the ones you would normally read.

chief decision

Some people make decisions for a living. Yes, no, left, right, wait, proceed, increase, decrease. With every decision requiring thinking power and mental capacity, naturally, there is a limit to the number of decisions one can make on a given day.

CEOs showing up in the same outfit, year in year out, is no coincidence. Preserving thinking power for less mundane decisions seems like a smart move.

Whether it’s top CEOs or self-employed people just starting, with no one to make demands, balancing work and life is up to them. No one to impose a schedule, so even seemingly ordinary planning chips away at decision capacity.

transferability

Assuming all businesses worldwide have at least one thing in common, being; create added value. Does that then imply that even fundamentally different businesses can share some universal learnings amongst themselves?

Yes, but depending on how different the businesses are, the learnings may be very limited in number.

One universal principle that never goes out of fashion, though, is customer-centricity. Buzzword bingo aside, putting your customer first, anticipating their needs as much as possible, and providing stellar service is always beneficial for every type of business.