Independent workers are entrepreneurs
On Fast Company, an argument for independent workers not to call themselves freelancers. Instead, they ought to embrace the word “entrepreneur”.
Indeed, entrepreneurs are not necessarily venture-backed multi-million dollar boasting kids. Someone is an entrepreneur if they operate alone in the business world:
There’s no one else to blame if you fail or make a mistake. You're in charge of all the business decisions. No one pays you to sit at a desk when the work has run dry. Operating a business alone is a huge risk, a bet we independents place squarely on ourselves.
There’s just a tremendous amount of craftsmanship in between a great idea and a great product
Five Hard Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting Up
Five Hard Questions You Should Ask Yourself Before Starting Up
Ryan Hoover for some pragmatic, necessary questions you need to ask yourself before starting up. The most important one, for me, is passion. Would like to do what you’re doing for the next five years?
When Dropbox launched, there were at least half a dozen other “online storage” businesses in existence. The Apple iPod entered a market litered with crappy MP3 players. Google was famously the Nth Internet search engine. Stripe launched into a market crowded with Braintree and Paypal, and before that Authorize.net and others. Uber was not the first way you could order a taxi, although their spin on black cars was unique. Facebook was yet another social network in a market “saturated” by Myspace, Friendster, Orkut, Bebo, Hi5 and others.
Some good ideas have a lot of bad implementations before someone comes in and does it well enough to win big.
Some words of wisdom for entrepreneurs that too many people forget.
Coyle tells the story of Simon Clifford, a gym teacher from Leeds, England, who traveled to Brazil in 1997 to better understand why the Brazilians were so good at soccer.
While conventional wisdom had held that the main factors were poverty, soccer as a dominant national sport and a good climate, Clifford found that until the late 1950s, the Brazilians were not a soccer powerhouse. But during that decade, Brazil became obsessed with a type of indoor soccer called futsal. The game is played with a smaller, heavier ball in a much tighter indoor space. Because the ball is heavy and small, it can’t be kicked in the air easily. As a result, precision in passing is key.
In one minute of futsal, the average player passes six times as much as in a minute of regular soccer. And in soccer, passing precision is key in separating great from good. So inadvertently, the Brazilians were acquiring the right soccer skills through futsal in a much more deliberate way than if they had been training on large, outdoor fields. In 1958, Brazil won the World Cup, beginning a dynasty of soccer domination.
Asking whether 10000 hours of practice can help achieve entrepreneurial excellence, Jon Auerbach of Charles River Ventures tell us this story. The upshot is that sometimes, practice isn’t deliberate; so perhaps you have been practicing for something but you are not aware of it yet.