https://newsletter.butwhatfor.com/p/invert-always-invert-avoid-failure
Don’t ask yourself, “How can I have a great, fulfilling career?” Instead, ask yourself “How can I have a terrible, worthless career?” and whittle away at the choices that you know will ensure that outcome:
- Stay in a dying industry.
- Stay ignorant of emerging technology.
- Continue to be a rent-taker as opposed to adding value.
- Prioritize near-term income over long-term value.
- Continue working with people that treat you poorly.
- Continue to think like a junior team resource.
- Be reactive to opportunity as opposed to proactive. And so on.
Now you have a list of actions to avoid. Avoiding them begins to move you away from failure and closer to reaching your goal.
But the process must be iterative — you have to re-think and re-test your views of how to best destroy your future self. Doing so will continuously refine how you can succeed by avoiding failure. For every action, you can then ask whether you are aligned with a future failure or success.
Same for your company - what blunders would kill it ?
https://longform.asmartbear.com/avoid-blundering/
- Didn’t talk to customers (and listen)
- No market need / Bad market
- Did not select a target audience, and clearly communicate the value proposition to them
- Too many things had to go right
- Founders / investors broke up
- Had no differentiation in the market
- Refused to seek the truth / refused to see the truth / refused to learn
- Launching too early / Launching too late
- Premature scaling
- Selling to the Enterprise before $20M ARR
- Unworkable business model / cannot be profitable
- Writing code instead of winning customers
- Expanding the target market before winning the target market / moving too quickly to the second product
- Lack of passion / endurance