Recently I saw Jason Lemkin tweet his answer to “What Has Been Your Biggest Career Mistake?“, and it got me thinking about my own. I’m not quite a decade into my own professional experience, but after seven jobs and numerous positions, promotions, and a layoff I’ve made my share of mistakes. And what’s more fun […]
Too many of us live our lives in fear of failing. While some have a fear of flying, I think that once you’ve been through some great successes you no longer fear doing too well. The goal becomes to also be okay with the opposite – failure.
Anyone who is driven and wants to succeed must come up against this. It’s easy to stay in the known and optimize towards a 3-4% better conversion rate, but what happens when you want to 10x your business in the next few months? You won’t get there by doing tiny changes that get you .25% better (unless you are building off a huge base already). You have to change your mindset. Read more about On Being Willing To Fail …
There are many perks to running your own business, and mine specifically lets me work with amazing marketers and entrepreneurs who can run their businesses from anywhere in the world. I’ve read so many books about remote working and how to set up a business that allows this. Books like The Four Hour Workweek and Vagabonding have inspired me while websites like NomadList.com keep me constantly dreaming. Even Facebook marketers are targeting me about traveling the world and working. Read more about CredoCamp – Lessons Learned Working Remotely …
I love architecture. Part of the reason why I worked in rentals/real estate for a while was so that I could look at photos of beautiful apartments and houses all day while pretending to do work. I’m kidding about the pretending to do work part (mostly).
Houses mystify and excite me. My wife and I are thinking about building a house in the next couple of years, yet we have absolutely no idea where to start. Do we find an architect first? Should we buy land now or later? What about plumbing and electricity – how do we know how to set that up if we’re not in a development? We know where we want to end up – with a beautiful mid-century modern home in a beautiful setting – but how do we get there?
Bootstrapping a business is the same way.
Read more about Bootstrapped vs VC – Building Houses Before Skyscrapers …
The Internet is littered with side projects that never received the attention they could have and thus never took off like they might have. I love side hustle post-mortems and stories of serendipitous things that happen because of them. Others have written on this topic, so now it’s my turn.
I would bet that every entrepreneur’s journey is full of these, and mine is no different. I’ve set out with big intentions to launch communities in a couple different areas I’m interested in (outdoors gear and cycling), bought a site to use as my home base as a nomadic marketing consultant (which never materialized), started writing an ebook about marketing that I never finished (but built a big email list for), and more. Each of these “failed projects” taught me something different that was valuable. In fact, I’ve come to think of each of mine as failed startups and now count them as part of my journey to finally having a business that could succeed.
Here are the lessons I learned. Read more about Why I Create Side Projects I Never Finish …
Update: thanks for all the amazing reactions to this post! I have loved reading all of your emails/tweets/direct messages and hearing so many stories about people who have been laid off and it turned out to be a blessing in disguise. If you want to check out my company Credo, it’s right here.
I got laid off in September of this past year, somewhat unexpectedly. Things had been rough for a while as I moved to a new team internally after an acquisition and we tried to figure out how we supported my new role. Right after I moved over to the new team the GM in charge of that team left, which at the time felt like an omen and I came to realize later it was. When you lose the person who advocated to bring you to a new position, who has the vision for how that role will look, you’re going to be in for some hard challenges that you might not be able to win.
Today I want to talk about exactly the steps I have taken over the last few months that have led me to double my salary short term, which is how I am currently financing my software marketplace which is also growing substantially month over month. Read more about How Getting Laid Off Led Me To Double My Salary and Follow My Entrepreneurial Dream …