Wednesday, August 29, 2007

I make mistakes!!!!!

This is not an apology.  I am saying this proudly. 

Today I was thinking how important this is to business-- the art of making mistakes.  No seriously.

If you are afraid of making a mistake you will probably not last very long as a business owner or starter (Entrepreneur).  Many people are in this boat.  They don't want to come across as stupid so they take one of two steps.

  1. They don't even try.
  2. They plan it down to every detail and take so long that by the time they start it doesn't really have much punch.

Do you look at a successful person and think they never made a mistake?  I do!  It's probably not true.  There are some people that seem to make every correct decision from the beginning and everything went their way.  Those people make the business journals and it is impressive.  I find myself hoping they can hold on because I am pretty sure that at some point they will make a mistake and then what do they do?  Their mistake is much more public than mine.  How embarrassing.

To be successful in business for a long term say 30 years I am pretty sure that you will come across a mistake and will have to recover from that mistake.  This is the next group of people and they also seem to do one of two things:

  1. They give up!
  2. They become frustrated and try to learn everything they can from that expensive mistake.  And if it isn't an expensive mistake it wasn't good enough. 

You have to recover from mistakes to be successful.  Today I was remembering some of my big mistakes and thinking about all the truly important lessons I learned from them.  It is crucial to keep picking yourself up and try, try again.  No it isn't easy.  It's embarrassing.  It will mess with your feelings of self-worth.  If you do it right even your friends and family will wonder if you will ever make anything of yourself.  YOU will wonder if you will ever make anything of yourself.  It makes you feel stupid to make a big mistake. 

One of the best things you learn from making a huge mistake is how to recognize a mistake earlier and take action.  You also learn what not to do next time (hopefully). 

Making mistakes is extremely important in business.  If you are really smart you will notice your mistakes early and recover from them quickly.  I hope you do, but it appears that the normal way this goes is that people make big mistakes and that's how they learn to pay more attention to small mistakes.

I Promise that I will keep making mistakes and I also promise that I will try to learn as much as I can from those mistakes.  I apologize if my mistake causes you any problems.  Know that I didn't mean to make the mistake.  I didn't set out to do it but it did happen. 

Monday, August 13, 2007

Team Works

I've been writing about this same basic subject for a while now, but this is another way at getting to the same conclusion.  In business Teams get more done than individuals.  I'm reading a book called "Wikinomics" right now and it is inspiring me once again to do what I have always needed to do, Get Help!

This is a topic I write about and think about often probably because as a business person I tend to think more about what I can do than about how I could lead a team.  I figure I'll start it, get it running work out the bugs and then get the help I need.  But maybe that is all wrong.  Maybe it's even backwards. 

I haven't written much in the last few months and every time I do I'm writing about this subject.  It's because this is a topic I am trying to get through my "thick skull" as the saying goes.  I do need to Get Help and I need to do it fast.

If I could get talented people to help me it would make my life so much easier.  Heck, even if I could get mildly talented people it would make a huge difference.

Here is an example of what I'm thinking of but from my family not work...

Often on the weekend my family operates as a bunch of individuals.  I get up mow the lawn while my wife works on the inside.  The kids, they do their own thing.  This last weekend we did it different.  My wife got the kids doing tasks to help in the house.  Earlier in the week my wife got the kids helping to pressure wash the back patio and deck as well as sanded it for painting.  Next we all got out to wash the cars together.  We did the whole thing wash, armour-all and windows.  My daughter painted her room furniture.  So instead of taking all day long we got a lot of stuff accomplished by 2:30 pm and we still had time to do something, so we cleaned up and left the house for a hike.

That's the biggest reason to make teams work in business, why?  So you can have fun doing it and mostly so you can have fun after you have done it.  PLAY.  I love to get out with my family and Play.  Finding people to help me get even more accomplished in a much shorter time allows me to get everything done that I want to do with my day.

Even though I had a great weekend and I'm fired up about teams I still have a lot of work to do.  You see sometimes it is a little uncomfortable.  Sometime it doesn't feel like you are getting much accomplished because you have to teach while you are getting the job done.  Then you think boy I could do this easier if I just took care of it myself.  Dumb, dumb, dumb and I'm talking to me!  It's going to take me a while to get this all worked out.

I have gotten some help and I put out the call for programmers.  I wrote about a project I did using Other People's Time and it was a great experience.  I also have the need to get help with my programming projects.  I keep trying to do it all myself and I want to find a better way.

I have grown my business by doing it all myself before and I don't want to do it again.  Even though it is not easier to get help I am still committed to doing it that way.  I have found that often one man operations are that way because we want to be the smartest person in the room.  I feel the need.  I go to talk to a customer about computers and networks and I feel the need to be the smartest person in the room.  I want to impress my customer with my knowledge and experience.  Hopefully my experience will always be something that helps my customers navigate a difficult challenge, but I'm tired of trying to be the smartest in the room.  I am ready to be the guy with the best team to get the job done, not be the guy with the biggest brain to get the job done.