What’s ACTUALLY Important to Think About in Your Business? (FS019)

Over and over again early business starters approach Corbett for advice and he notices them focusing on the wrong stuff, wasting time on unimportant things, things that have absolutely no effect on whether or not their business will be a success.

We can get so worked up about the trees that we miss out on the forest. What we need is clarity and direction and a higher vantage point on whether or not our business idea can be successful, and how to get it there.

There are hundreds of business questions you could worry about. Which are actually important and which will waste your time? That’s what we explore in this conversation.

Get your notepad out and look for Corbett’s “4 Parts of a Business” list. As you’ll find out, this’ll help you evaluate struggles and bottlenecks in your business and make some changes.

Show Notes

Be Good by Paul Graham — “About a month after we started Y Combinator we came up with the phrase that became our motto: Make something people want. We’ve learned a lot since then, but if I were choosing now that’s still the one I’d pick.”

Paul Graham on Building Companies for Fast Growth | Inc.com — “…most of the time, start-ups fail for the same reasons restaurants do: Their food is bad.”

Nolan Bushnell on the Critical Ingredient — “The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It’s as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer.”

Twitter / hotdogsladies: Joining a Facebook group about … — “Joining a Facebook group about creative productivity is like buying a chair about jogging.”

What I Wish I’d Known Before Starting My Business (FS016)

Steve Jobs on the Secret — “Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.”

How To Stay Motivated (FS010) — This is the Stephen Pressfield in his underwear episode.

Ira Glass on Storytelling on Vimeo

Brad Feld on the Most Challenging Thing — “It’s relatively easy to focus on the short-term cycle, such as the 90 days of an accelerator program; it’s a lot harder to think about the next decade and how what you are doing today impacts where you want to be ten years from now.”

Paleo Plan | Making the Paleo Diet Easier — this is the example we talk about in the episode. There’s an excellent founder’s story with the founder of Paleo Plan, Jason Glaspey in Fizzle.

John Galt – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It’s Not That I Don’t Suffer – Feld Thoughts — “Failure (and suffering) is part of the experience, but it shouldn’t be part of your soul or a permanent scar across your view of existence.”

The Struggle // ben’s blog — “The Struggle is when you go on vacation to feel better and you feel worse… The Struggle is when you are surrounded by people and you are all alone…”