The secret to business success — to any success — is simple. Just get started.
Don’t worry about getting it right the first time. You won’t. The only question is how bad that first effort will be. Mine are always awful.
I’d like to believe that I’m a reasonably competent human being. I don’t have to be “the best” before I can add value to the lives of other people, or have fun. Nor do I have to be perfect. When I started, like you, I was pretty inadequate. My mother assures me that I did, at least once, soil my diapers. And on occasion, although I don’t believe this, I was apparently naughty. Yet I, somehow, as all of us do, turned out vaguely useful.
Every day somebody who has never sent an e-mail newsletter will ask me all sorts of complex questions so that their first attempt can be “perfect”. Why should it be?
My first mass email attempt was awful. Roger Bannister’s first attempt to run a mile, which would have been the first time he ran around a track at the age of seven, was probably pretty awful as well.
But if you just get started — no matter how dreadful your first attempt — you learn so much from those first stumbling efforts that your next try is 200% better. And by the third effort you start looking like a seasoned professional.
Contrast this with trying to get it perfect the very first time. You never get to look like a seasoned professional because you never get out of the starting gate!
We confuse our humble resources as individuals (and very small businesses) with those of Telkom who can afford to spend huge amounts of money to achieve a look that we all know is a complete lie. I would much rather have a more humble presentation that is much closer to the truth of who I am.
On the one hand technology is a wonderful blessing. On the other hand, it complicates life immeasurably by giving us far more options than we need. My car radio, for instance, has so many buttons that I no longer press any. Not even the button which switches it on. I long for the days when I didn’t have to make any decisions. Two knobs, one on each side of the radio, one for tuning, and the other for volume. And Mick Jagger yelling “Paint it Black”. Bliss.