Stop Dreaming, Start Planning

#escapemanifesto preview: Reject norms

Team Esc — Fri, 24 May 2013 14:14:26 +0000

Advocating non-conformity for the sake of it is the career version of the moody teenager who just wants to be different. We are not encouraging petulant rebellion, we are urging you to consciously differentiate yourself from the established way of doing things precisely because the estab- lished way is unlikely to give you what you want. Fitting in may feel safe. However, in a hugely competitive job market and weak economy the surest way to become irrelevant is to keep your head down. You need to stand out. When the chips are down you don’t want to be the one asking for permission.

Paul Graham, the Silicon Valley entrepreneur, startup mentor and essay- ist, compares graduate job-seeking behaviour to animals being let out of cages and not realizing that the door is open. We are all influenced by the cages of our existence. The fact that we aren’t immediately aware of them makes them all the more effective. The belief that “the route to success is to get a good job” is so ingrained it’s almost a religion. People often react to alternative advice with absolute horror. Just as they do when they hear young people being advised against going to university. These are powerful norms.

FROM CHAPTER 9: THERE IS NO GUIDEBOOK

By now, you’re probably aware that we wrote a book (you helped!) and we’re excited to be really close to the final publish date. The Escape Manifesto (#escapemanifesto on Twitter) is the book behind the movement and is here to support, inspire and encourage us all to make big and brave transitions in our lives. Over the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing snippets on this blog.

#escapemanifesto preview: Fight fear

Team Esc — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:14:24 +0000

Doing something different is scary. Quitting your job is scary.

Starting your own business is scary. Having no income for a while is scary. Changing jobs is scary.

Taking a point of view is scary. Cold calling is scary.

Public speaking is scary.

Being challenged is scary. Managing people is scary. Saying no is scary.

Being in it for the long run is scary. Talking to aggressive journalists is scary.

FROM CHAPTER 9: THERE IS NO GUIDEBOOK

#escapemanifesto preview: Ignore cynics

Team Esc — Wed, 22 May 2013 14:14:21 +0000

If you are considering quitting your corporate job for something more exciting, unconventional or adventurous, many people will tell you that it isn’t a good idea. Sometimes these people will be your nearest friends and family. They’ll be naturally risk-averse because they don’t want to see you in trouble (financially or otherwise). Other people will project their hopes and fears onto you if you do something different. You implicitly represent a challenge to their life choices. Expect criticism. Use this as fuel for your motivation!

Beware advice. There is an awful lot of unsolicited and bad advice out there. Advice is usually based on the experiences and worldview of the person giving the advice – not based on a real understanding of your goals. You are the only person who really knows what you are trying to achieve. When you ask people for advice they will generally tell you to do what they’ve done. Unless it went badly, in which case they’ll tell you to do the opposite. People give you advice based on what worked for them. Not necessarily what will work for you.

The world is full of all different types of people. It’s one of the reasons why life is so exciting. Optimists and pessimists, cynics and enthusiasts. When you’re making any big life change you really need to surround yourself with glass-half-full people. You need all the buoyancy you can get. The tricky thing is that often those closest to you will be the ones telling you that your plans are a bad idea. There’s very little you can do other than tell them that you’re really excited about your plans and that you’d appreciate their support.

Illegitimi non carborundum.

FROM CHAPTER 9: THERE IS NO GUIDEBOOK

#escapemanifesto preview: Commit

Team Esc — Tue, 21 May 2013 14:14:07 +0000

Anyone who has achieved anything worth admiring, envying or copying has had to commit. At some point, they had to grit their teeth and turn inaction into action. They didn’t necessarily have to quit their job and tell everyone they’d ever met (although sometimes that helps). But they did have to overcome their fear of the unknown and create some kind of motion in the outside world.

The surest way to force yourself to do something is to publicly commit. Once you’ve told all your friends that you’re cycling to Rome for charity, it’s hard to tell them that you’re not going to do it. Once you’ve resigned from your job and told your boss that you’re starting a mobile tea busi- ness, it would give your pride quite a knock to ask for your job back.

Start small but aim high. If someone had told us three years ago that we’d be running a business that helps people escape their jobs, with over a 100,000 members, a published book, a base in New York and a team of eight people . . . we’d have laughed at them. However, had we not com- mitted to starting the Escape the City blog back in 2009 we never would have set ourselves on this path and you wouldn’t be reading this book today.

FROM CHAPTER 9: THERE IS NO GUIDEBOOK

#escapemanifesto preview: Get going with what you’ve got

Team Esc — Mon, 20 May 2013 14:14:30 +0000

The temptation is always to say “oh let’s just wait until we’ve got that bit built” or “we’ll be ready when x, y or z happens”. It’s really important to accept that nothing is going to be perfect and you can usually always change things. Escape the City will probably never be “ready”. There’s always another improvement. Fight your natural perfectionism and get stuff out there. You’ll fix things quicker if they’re already in public.

We started a blog and started spreading the word about our concept. No idea remains unchanged by contact with the people you are building it for. The other thing to remember is that you’re not really in public. In three years time with a massive customer base you’ll be in public. Cur- rently just your mum, a few friends and a couple of random Facebook fans have a clue what you’re doing. So develop your idea in front of them and embrace early low-key failures. Keep the problem you’re trying to solve clear but be brave enough to change tactics as you go.

Make decisions quickly. It’s really hard to agonize over decisions. Some- times they are worth agonizing over. Sometimes you need more informa- tion, advice or events need to take place in order for you to make a decision. A few things worth bearing in mind: there is rarely a “right” or “wrong” decision . . . there are just different (often multiple) paths that you could take. This is true for life as well as in business. We’ve found that it’s far better to make a decision and get on with the plan (without looking over your shoulder) than to waste too much time trying to figure out what to do.

The sooner you can get someone to pay you the better. It doesn’t matter if it’s not in your world-beating business plan. As long as you have enough revenues to cover your base costs (and keep your costs really low) your business won’t die. Isn’t that an exciting thought?

FROM CHAPTER 8: START YOUR OWN BUSINESS

#escapemanifesto preview: Bin the business plan

Team Esc — Fri, 17 May 2013 14:14:05 +0000

The temptation to write a 50-page business plan before or while you build your business is very strong. You feel like you’re being responsible, anticipating all the likely scenarios and getting a proper plan in place. You’re applying all your corporate skills – you’re increasing your confidence.

The problem is that every day that goes by that you’re polishing bullet points in your business plan is another day that nothing is actually changing in the outside world. No one knows about your business. You’re not testing any of your core assumptions. All you’re doing is making yourself feel better. Of course plans are useful, however you can’t make a real plan until you’ve gathered real data about the market.

You may need to get investment or land a big partnership to even get your business off the ground. You may think that these parties need to see reams of pages showing you’ve thought it all through. Firstly, do you want to work with people who demand this level of time wasting? Sec- ondly, can you show them a one-page summary, a prototype, customer testimonials or some other real proof that you will be able to do what you claim you’re going to do?

Earlier in this book we talked of the importance of applying startup thinking to your career. Here the comparison comes full circle. Instead of wasting years and lots of money finding out that your business model is flawed, adopt a “Lean Startup” approach to testing hypotheses. Develop your customers rather than your product. Apply this to your business model. read The Lean Startup by Eric ries. Get your head around the jargon. The core messages are extremely important. Heed Steve Blank’s advice “no business plan survives first contact with customers” (Google “Steve Blank Udacity course” for an excellent guide through this process).

rather than writing a business plan and pretending your way out of uncertainty you should test your way out of uncertainty. Fight the fear that stops you from putting your idea in front of the people you are building it for. You can learn so much about a potential business idea without ever opening PowerPoint.

FROM CHAPTER 8: START YOUR OWN BUSINESS

#escapemanifesto preview: Escape the Matrix

Team Esc — Thu, 16 May 2013 14:14:03 +0000

Living in a city, working in a big company, travelling on public transport, eating hand-to-mouth (sandwiches at your desk, supermarket ready- meals in the evening), magically getting paid at the end of each month (tax deducted), wearing your uniform (a suit like everyone else) it’s very easy to forget what it’s like to properly look after yourself, to make your own decisions.

You can get by in this way for a long time. Forever in fact. Cruise control. Before we quit our corporate jobs adventures kept us sane. Cycling from London to Paris in under 24 hours, kayaking down a river in northern Portugal, canoeing the Yukon, road trips through California. These were distraction mechanisms for sure and we’d feel even worse when we got back to our cubicles. So why did we do this? How did it help?

We found that adventures (even quick overnight ones – walking through the night along the Sussex downs, motorbiking in the rain to Stone- henge) helped to strip away some of the bullshit from work, society and our peers that was keeping us stuck.

Realizing that we were capable of looking after ourselves – even if it was just on a 3-day bicycle trip around northern France – is an incredibly empowering thing. If you can direct your own life even temporarily and get a thrill out of it perhaps you’ll be able to consider a longer-term com- mitment to being fully in charge?

FROM CHAPTER 7: ADVENTURE

#escapemanifesto preview: Tell a good story

Team Esc — Wed, 15 May 2013 12:44:59 +0000

The definition of a good story? “A character that wants something and overcomes conflict to get it” (borrowed from A Million Miles in a Thousand Years by Donald Miller).

What do you want? What stands in your way?

Humans respond well to stories. Our brains remember stories. We tell each other good stories. Your challenge is to narrate a memorable story about who you are, what you’ve done, and how what you’ve done leads into what you want to do. You should do this in applications, in person and throughout your online presence. draw a thread through all your random past experiences and future aspirations. Show people why it makes sense (even if it doesn’t necessarily!).

Help people join the dots in a compelling way and they’re more likely to understand what you’re looking for and refer you for the opportunities that you’re after. We’re also talking about the gatekeepers and connec- tors here, not just the end employer.

The important thing to realize is that you’re constantly being interviewed for a job opportunity that you don’t yet know about. You’re never just assessed on the day of an interview – your reputation precedes you and your online presence represents you (or lack of it). If you can tell a story through your actions and information people can find out about you that speaks for itself (rather than having to deliver the pitch in person) all the better. What people say about you is always far more powerful than what you say about yourself.

FROM CHAPTER 6: FIND AN EXCITING JOB

#escapemanifesto preview: Reframe the risk

Team Esc — Tue, 14 May 2013 12:44:57 +0000

Dom rationalized his resignation in the following way: “If I was to tell people I was leaving to do a Masters the conversations I’d be having would all be about how much I’ll learn and how it was a good, safe option. But exactly the same goes for startups. Even if it fails, I’ll learn more trying to start a business than I have ever done doing anything so far and I won’t have to pay tuition fees.”

Dom could easily have spent two years getting into debt chasing another qualification and it wouldn’t have been seen as a big risk. So he began thinking about starting a business differently. It was like a Masters he wasn’t going to pay for and if it failed, he could simply find a new job.

Once we’d had the idea, we weren’t prepared to carry on in our jobs with the nagging “what if’s”, never knowing whether we’d have been able to pull it off. Both of us called Escape the City a project and a com- munity before we ever called it a business. In this way, and especially before we resigned, we were playing a subtle mind-trick on ourselves – removing some of the pressure.

Rather than thinking about the risks of making a change, perhaps you should ask yourself what the risk is of not doing what you really want to do with your life?

FROM CHAPTER 5: EVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION

#escapemanifesto preview: Don’t quit just yet

Team Esc — Mon, 13 May 2013 12:44:54 +0000

So you’ve decided you’re going to leave . . .

Firstly, congratulations! Seriously. Many of us stay in the pre-decision cycle for years (if not forever). If you’re in a position to decide that you’re going to leave – even if you don’t know what you’re going to do next – celebrate the exciting feeling of knowing that change is coming your way. The next few pages cover that exciting and terrifying period in between resolving to leave and the moment you walk out of those doors for the last time.

You may work in an environment that is genuinely doing you no good at all but even though you probably need to get out of there as soon as possible, you still need to be careful that you’re not just running away from something. Once you’ve made the decision that you’re going to leave . . . what do you do next? You need a plan!

Way before actually resigning Scott Gilmore, founder of Open Markets, spoke to other people who had launched their own charity or social enterprise: “from them I got the sense that this would be hard, but it was possible”. He also spoke with his father, a successful entrepreneur, and obtained his guidance and advice about how to start and grow a business.

Once Jon Warren made his mind up to escape private wealth client management he stopped standing outside the office with the smokers talking about how he was going to move to Spain and set up a business. Instead he started putting together ideas and business plans during his lunch break. He now runs his own food company on the Bay of Biscay called San Sebastian Food, creating unique food and wine experiences.

Unless your plan is to quit without a plan (i.e. to give yourself breathing space or to go on a big adventure), KEEP YOUR JOB! The most sure-fire way to end up back in another corporate job that drives you up the wall within six months is to quit without knowing what you’re going to do or without enough of a financial safety net. Remember Roz Savage’s advice – evolution not revolution.

FROM CHAPTER 5: EVOLUTION NOT REVOLUTION

#escapemanifesto preview: Invest in yourself, not stuff

Team Esc — Fri, 10 May 2013 12:44:53 +0000

The two most constructive ways you can invest in yourself are through new experiences and education. You don’t have to quit your job to do either of these.

D.H. Lawrence said that travel is the only thing you spend money on that makes you richer.

Rare is the person who returns from a genuinely new and adventurous experience without a fresh perspective on something they took for granted at home.

Learn. Use the library, beg, steal, download and borrow books. There really is no excuse for being uninformed about anything you consider important for your career transition.

We advocate spending consciously and spending on things that are important to you. Look your finances in the eye and then look your values in the eye. Decide how much you need and want (there’s no wrong answer) for what you want to do. Then plan accordingly.

FROM CHAPTER 4: THE MONEY QUESTION

#escapemanifesto preview: Escape begins with definition

Team Esc — Thu, 09 May 2013 12:44:51 +0000

Charles Givens, the American personal finance guru, gives this advice in Wealth Without Risk: “Ask yourself: ‘If I had unlimited, time, talent, money, ability, self-confidence and support from my family, what would I do?’ Then, list the steps necessary to achieve these goals.”

OK, so you don’t have unlimited time and money . . . but what he wants you to do is envision goals beyond the constraints of your current situa- tion. This is hard but not impossible. It’s amazing what can be achieved by breaking big objectives into step-by-step activities.

One of the first things you should do when planning a career escape is define your needs and wants. What is your 100% non-negotiable minimum annual income? Or not even minimum . . . what is the figure you want to be earning after you’ve successfully escaped?

Realize that there may be a period of transition when you don’t earn this amount (“the Hit”). It’s up to you how long this period is. Just as it is up to you to reject situations where the period is longer than you are pre- pared to accept or can afford. This is a very personal and subjective part of your career transition.

If escape begins with definition you need to be clear on two things:

That you know how much money you need for the life you want.
That you have been really honest that this genuinely is the life you want (and not the life that you think you want).

Money has no value without context. In the bank it may provide you with a feeling of security. But the pre-requisite is that you value that feeling of security . . . otherwise it is just a number. In order to have congruence between your financial goals and your objectives in life, you need to set goals for what your money will ENABLE you to do.

Therefore it can’t just be a number, it should be a number plus an objec- tive (it could be a house, it could be private school for your kids, or it could be owning a hotel on the beach in Africa). The objective is entirely up to you – just make sure it is yours and no one else’s.

FROM CHAPTER 4: THE MONEY QUESTION

#escapemanifesto preview: Write your own obituary

Team Esc — Wed, 08 May 2013 12:44:33 +0000

Meet Roz Savage.

The year is 2000. She is 33 years old. She seems to have the perfect life: a job (management consultant, of course!), a husband, a home and a little red sports car. Fast forward to March 2006, she is 38, divorced, homeless, and alone in a tiny rowing boat in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Today she is a world-famous, TEd-speaking adventurer and environmental campaigner.5

How did this happen? One day, fed up with sitting on the commuter train “wondering whether this was what life was all about”, she sat down and wrote two versions of her obituary. The first one was the one she wanted to have. The second one was the one that she was heading for. In her own words: “the difference between the two was startling. Clearly some- thing was going to have to change.”

We’re not suggesting that you should quit your job and go and row around the world. The thoughts that drove Roz to make such big changes and the subsequent process of transitioning are what make this story relevant. It is easy to get so bound up in the race to climb your career ladder that you can often forget to ask whether you are climbing the right one. looking ahead to the end of your life can be a powerful way of putting your week-to-week decisions and worries in perspective.

FROM CHAPTER 3: GRADUAL EPIPHANIES

#escapemanifesto preview: Avoid living for the future

Team Esc — Tue, 07 May 2013 13:51:10 +0000

Tim Ferriss (author of The 4-Hour Work Week) calls it The deferred life Plan. Alastair Humphreys (who cycled around the world) calls it The Race To The Biggest Gravestone. Randy Komisar (author of The Monk and The Riddle) calls it “The Biggest Risk of All” (the risk of spending your life not doing what you want on the bet you can buy yourself the freedom to do it later). In the context of corporate jobs, we call it the “I’ll do This For 5 Years And Then I’ll Go do Something Else” promise.

Our moment of truth came when we realized that we were no longer kids and that it was time to take responsibility for our path in life. Just the other day we were fresh-faced graduates with ideals, naïvety and dreams. Then suddenly we were getting grey hairs. Time started going by really fast and, for some reason (perhaps it was the routine of the corporate world) seemed to be accelerating! Why were we spending our precious time doing things that didn’t matter to us?!

Spending time doing work that you don’t want to do, you are wasting valuable time that could be spent discovering new interests and devel- oping skills, contacts and experiences in new areas.

FROM CHAPTER 3: GRADUAL EPIPHANIES

#escapemanifesto preview: We talk ourselves out of decisions

Team Esc — Mon, 06 May 2013 13:56:04 +0000

You are probably familiar with the idea of Analysis Paralysis – the process of over-analysing a situation to the extent that a decision is never taken. We certainly are. Never has the theory been more applicable than to our own muddled thought processes when we were trying to escape.

It’s worth checking out an excellent Huffington Post article called “More Options, More Problems”. It starts with “deferring a decision means you haven’t made one. Thus, some of the most talented individuals in the world find themselves stuck in an unending holding pattern…”

If you work in the corporate world you’re probably relatively analytical. Your job might even involve analysing risk for other companies or assessing business plans. No wonder when it comes to your own life you apply the same level of rigour and risk aversion! It has become part of your thought process.

A private equity analyst recently emailed us. He is desperate to start a business but has critiqued so many business plans that he is terrified of trying his own.

What good decision-making requires is for you to be clear on your decision criteria. In a career context your criteria may be anything from salary, to colleagues, to location, to creativity, to impact.

Once you are clear on your criteria you can search for, eliminate and assess opportunities based on what you yourself are looking for.

FROM CHAPTER 2: THOUGHTS & BLOCKERS

#escapemanifesto preview: “I need to have it all figured out”

Team Esc — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:55:50 +0000

Here are some of the things we told ourselves whilst justifying why we weren’t getting any closer to leaving our jobs:

“We’re waiting for the right business idea…”
“We’re waiting to find our dream jobs…”
“We’re waiting to discover our passions…”
“We’re waiting for the right time…”

Waiting is passive and it involves a fundamental misunderstanding about the way the world works. We were like the little boys standing up against the wall in the playground, waiting to be picked for a team. The reality is that in order to find new opportunities, develop new interests, or come up with an exciting business idea you’re going to have to act.

We had fallen into the trap of thinking that we might wake up one day and “just know” what it is we were meant to do with our lives. Having worked on Escape the City for three years we now realize that this kind of thinking is extremely dangerous because it delays the essential work of taking the required steps to make things happen for yourself.

FROM CHAPTER 2: THOUGHTS & BLOCKERS

#escapemanifesto preview: The trap of the high achievers

Team Esc — Thu, 02 May 2013 13:52:58 +0000

FROM CHAPTER 1: THE TRAVELATOR

When we were setting up Escape the City in New York we met a banker who admitted that she was probably an alcoholic and that she spent all of her money on clothes to distract herself from how much she hated her job. But she was unwilling to compromise on the salary. She was so used to jumping through the next hoop in the ladder of achievement that she said she was completely clueless as to what else she could do.

That’s the same salary that she was splurging on expensive restaurants, booze and high-end couture just to help her deal with the job itself. Is that not absolute madness? Imagine what a large escape fund she could save up in a short amount of time with that cash. She could go travelling for a year. She could start a business. Instead she was stuck in a cycle of consumption and depression.

If you are used to excelling, you usually gravitate towards the jobs where the best and brightest are meant to spend their time. Over the past two decades this has been the professional and financial services sectors – investment banks and corporate law firms.

Often the people who are the unhappiest in their jobs are those who have never failed, who have never dropped a grade. As Rob Archer, the Career Psychologist, said at a recent Escape the City event: “Being rela- tively clever and very conscientious can be a dangerous combination. It means you’ll probably be good at what you do – good enough to get by – but you will also persist and keep trying harder and harder. You will get the job done – but it may be at the expense of your values, health, or even sanity.”

#escapemanifesto preview: The Travelator

Team Esc — Wed, 01 May 2013 13:44:42 +0000

FROM CHAPTER 1: THE TRAVELATOR

Ask yourself two questions, two questions that you have no doubt asked on many occasions when your evening plan evaporates into thin air as you are yet again required to stay late to work on a seemingly important task:

Question 1: Why am I working for this organization?

Question 2: Am I crazy if I don’t want to be here?

The problem is that the decision-making process that got you to where you are today may not have been entirely your own. Often the values of your work environment don’t reflect your own. Often it’s easier to inherit external definitions of success than it is to cultivate your own.

We reasoned that it was more important to focus on what we did want to do rather than wallow in the negatives of what we didn’t. However, we also realized that you do need to understand what you don’t like in order to discover what could make you tick.

How can you avoid your enemy if you can’t even identify him?

Open your eyes. You are on a Travelator.

Walk it knowingly or get off.

What Ziah did learn at our very first Startup MBA?

Rob — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 16:33:13 +0000

[A Note from Rob: Ziah - @zzziah - was one of 30 attendees at our Startup MBA course that finished yesterday. She kindly scribbled down what she took from the experience. Drop adele [@] escapethecity.org an email if you’d like to apply for a place if we run it again.]

I just finished the first offering of the Escape the City Startup MBA, which was a 2 weekend course on lean startup methodologies. The purpose of the course was to set you up with the knowledge and resources you needed to start your own business successfully, or at least to point you in the right direction.

The course was sold as a great way to learn from some industry experts in a focused way that filters through all the crap you might learn in your first year or two floundering and figuring out how to build at startup company. The idea is to give you a good foundation and help you get rolling on your own ideas in a fast, efficient way.

As someone who’s already “escaped” my job and who is looking into the startup environment and the possibility of starting my own business, this course was perfect for me. Of course, I think it would have been even more beneficial to me if I actually had an idea for a business already in mind and had made a little bit of headway (though not much! I learned a lot of ways to cut out waste in the early stages!).

There were about 30 people in the course, with a diverse spectrum of backgrounds, industries, and progress towards starting their own company. We had a really good cross section of folks, some from banking, some lawyers, some from teaching, some from government, a few randoms from food, tools, and then me, from art/media. The first night we spent giving a 4 minute introduction of ourselves, and I got more than a few bizarre looks and questions as to my mental health after saying I quit my job working on movies!

The one group that was not represented in the course, not at all surprisingly, was tech. I suppose that most technical folks who want to go start their own thing just go build it. That said, if I was a software engineer or developer that had been working for a larger company and was thinking about building my own tech startup, this course would have been SUPER useful – perhaps even more so than to any of us in the room. I was probably one of the more technical people in the room (coming from a CS degree and having experience with the web and web apps, etc.), but I would never really consider being a developer for my own company (at least not in the mid-to-long term). However, I feel like the group that may have been best served from this course could well have been developers.

Why should developers and software engineers bother with a course like this? Tons of reasons, but the most important one is this: developers love to go build stuff, and they often lose track of the goal, or think the goal is to finish the product, or write as much code as possible as fast as possible. But the biggest takeaway I learned in this course is that the goal is NOT the final product. The goal is LEARNING!

Validated learning is the goal, and although developers who are rarin’ to go and develop their brilliant tech product could get this information from The Lean Startup, the course delivered so much more.

The lead instructor on the course, Rob Fitzpatrick, was absolutely brilliant. Quirky, knowledgable, fun, and full of interesting stories – Rob had an amazing grip on the entire classroom when he was going through his startup experiences and the ins-and-outs of building a business from scratch. I could gush on and on and wax poetic about Rob, but you can read all of his blog posts for yourself. I highly recommend that you listen to him speak if you get a chance!!!

Here are the top things I learned from the course, in fairly random order based on what comes out of my head first:

Startups can’t measure their progress in conventional ways, so should measure their progress in terms of validated learning.
De-risk EVERYTHING as much as you can. You’re building something that by definition is uncertain, so you need to break things down into testable units to learn as much as you can as quickly and cheaply as you can.
You have to build something to really understand it. You can read a bunch of blogs, think about things, and study up as much as you want, but until you try to build something, you haven’t really learned anything yet.
Using the Business Model Canvas is a super useful way to quickly iterate on business ideas – you could come up with hundreds of ideas and quickly start validating (or invalidating) them using this model.
There’s a tool (usually a SAAS tool) that exists for almost everything these days that can help you do something smarter/faster/more efficiently. Know what’s going on in the tech world, as these things can save you days, weeks, months of time.
There’s only 2 legal things you really need to worry about getting right: (1) Own your own code (and other IP), and (2) settle the stock issue between founders. Everything else can be fixed later. Oh, and always read your contracts.
Get advisors! Depending on what you need, you should try to get tech, industry, or strategy advisors on board to help you out. And make sure you trust them.
Utilize your skills/experience as much as you can: it’s what makes your idea unique. What qualifies you to start this business in a way that no one else could?
Working alone is a drag. If it’s possible, have a co-founder. Or at least have a “business buddy” you can bounce ideas off of so you’re not sitting alone with your laptop in bed all the time.
Take time for physical health. We all know this (duh), but seriously. No, really.

And possibly the most important thing I learned (personally) in these 2 weekends:

Push as hard as you can part-time, while still working and supporting yourself on someone else’s dime.

This one was a massive surprise to me. I figured that if I just quit my job and had nothing else to get in the way and interrupt my genius brain, the ideas would flow and a bazillion dollar idea would just come to me. I’ve been having trouble figuring out why I’m having so much trouble with this part, since I have all the mental capacity in the world just waiting to be activated with my brilliant business idea, but it just hasn’t worked like that for me.

So, for me, I came out of this course with a lot more knowledge, but my first point of action is to UN-escape the city and get back into a paying job. It’s ironic that it took going to an event put on by a company called “Escape the City” to realize that for me, right now, that’s not what I need.

My plan: get a short-term or freelance gig to keep my brain more activated and my wallet more fat. Start saving. Keep learning. But, perhaps more importantly, start positioning myself in a way that once I have an idea I can take advantage of it! Start creating a tribe, work on setting up a network of trusted advisors, start learning the specific skills I’ll need. And once I actually have a valid idea that I think I want to start on, then start it! Just do it! Create an MVP and get dirty. BUT do all this while still working. Keep working until it’s just not possible/plausible anymore – until my time would be better spent on my startup business than working for my paying gig (whatever that might be).

So, all in all, I think it was £500 well spent for 5 solid days of instruction. The people I met, the information that got crammed into my head, and the realization that it’s okay (in fact, it’s GOOD) to keep your day job while you’re figuring things out – all of these things made this a really excellent course, and perfect for me at this point in my career/life.

Thanks, Escape the City. And many, many thanks, Rob.

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We need to avoid being like Mr.PowerPoint with our careers.

Rob — Fri, 12 Apr 2013 16:04:11 +0000

Gary Vaynerchuk is something of a sensation. Recognizing the importance of e-commerce in 1997, Gary launched Winelibrary.com and helped grow his family business significantly from $3 million to $45 million by 2005.

What follows is an extract from his book – The Thank You Economy – which I would strongly advise buying and reading. Although the book is predominately about social media and business, the messages are all relevant for us personally as well, in our careers.

The future is coming… fast. Are we ready?

Extract from Chapter 2 of The Thank You Economy by Gary Vaynerchuk:

In 1997, shortly after I launched WineLibrary.com, I was invited to a conference hosted by a local chapter of the New Jersey Chamber of Commerce to talk about online selling. It was my first speaking engagement, and I was pumped. I sat in the wings,trying to stay calm, as the speaker before me walked out onstage. He wore a tie. He had VP credentials and a fancy PowerPoint presentation. And the theme of his talk was that dotcom retail was a crock. It wasn’t practical, and it would never take off because, as the data on his PowerPoint slides revealed, nobody in Middle America was buying, nor would they ever buy, on the Internet. Mr. PowerPoint asked the audience, “How many of you have heard of Amazon?” A solid number of people raised their hands. He went on to ask if they really thought people would abandon the relationships they’d built over the years with their local bookstores, or even bypass super-stocked Barnes & Noble. They didn’t.

It would be another two years before CEO Jeff Bezos would be named Time’s Person of the Year, his name underscored on the cover by the subhead “E-commerce is changing the way the world shops.” It would be another four years before Amazon reached its first quarterly net profit. Mr. PowerPoint compared the company’s rising market share to its nonexistent profits and said that one day we would all look back and say, “Remember Amazon?”

My short-term dream at the time was to become the Amazon for wine, and the audience I was about to explain that dream to was staring at this PowerPointing clown’s charts and graphs as if they were carved stone tablets brought down by Moses. As he finished up, he said, “This kid’s now going to tell you how he’s going to sell wine on the Internet. How many of you here would ever buy wine on the Internet?” Only one or two people out of sixty or seventy raised their hands. You know if this had happened in 2010, the talk would have been recorded and I could have posted it to show everyone what a jerk he was. But believe it or not, even though he called me a kid, he did earn my respect for calling me out. I like people with competitive spirit and bravado; they bring outthe fightin me. Not that I won any battles that day.

I walked out onstage and opened my talk by saying, “With all due respect to Mr. PowerPoint, he has no idea what he’s talking about. He is going to be on the wrong side of history. I feel bad for him.” I went on to tell my story, and gave my audience my best, most heartfelt argument as to why the Internet would be to retailers what the printing press was to writers. To the end, they remained a very skeptical, uninterested crowd.

Entrepreneurs have a sort of sixth sense that tells them when big change is afoot. The Time magazine article that accompanied Bezos’s Person of the Year award describes it best:

Every time a seismic shift takes place in our economy, there are people who feel the vibrations long before the rest of us do, vibrations so strong they demand action—action that can seem rash, even stupid. Ferry owner Cornelius Vanderbilt jumped ship when he saw the railroads coming. Thomas Watson Jr., overwhelmed by his sense that computers would be everywhere even when they were nowhere, bet his father’s office-machine company on it: IBM.

Jeffrey Preston Bezos had that same experience when he first peered into the maze of connected computers called the World Wide Web and realized that the future of retailing was glowing back at him.

Buy The Thank You Economy here.

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