If you work for 10 years, do you get 10 years of experience or do you get 1 year of experience 10 times?
Case-studies and mental models
When I was back in business school at Florida International University, we were given a lot of case-studies on some of the most renowned companies:
- Amazon.com
- IKEA
- Starbucks
- Apple
And although I did gain a lot of insight into how great leaders made decisions about their business, I feel like I’ve done most of my learning by being faced with and tackling the actual problems of running my own small business, Recording-Box
We were also taught about mental models, which are representations on how to think, reason and take action more effectively.
The businessman and investor, Charlie Munger talks about mental models quite a bit.
you can find some at Farnam Street: https://fs.blog/mental-models/
and you can learn all about them, but which ones matter more in certain circumstances?
Learning by doing
When running a small business you have to do a lot of the work yourself, it just comes with the territory. But I don’t spend every day doing the exact same things in the same way:
- sweeping the floor de exact same way
- stocking the shelves in the exact same way
- flipping the open sign the exact same way
Sure I’d be racking up hundreds and even thousands of hours of work, but would I be learning anything from that?
Steve McConnell put it this way on page 832 of his 2004 book, Code Complete:
“The bottom line on experience is this: if you work for 10 years, do you get 10 years of experience or do you get 1 year of experience 10 times? You have to reflect on your activities to get true experience. If you make learning a continuous commitment, you’ll get experience. If you don’t, you won’t, no matter how many years you have under your belt.”
What I am doing is I’m iterating.
I’m trying new ways to market my podcasting services.
I’m packaging services like live-session recordings in a slightly different way.
I’m working on the businesses branding
I’m trying different business networking activities
I’m incorporating new software tools like Monday.com and Asana to keep track of my projects and find new leads.
These iterations is what drives the learning curve my friends.
And you know what? sometimes doing new things hurts, because you’re venturing off outside of your comfort zone. You will fail, and you will lose money sometimes too.
But I believe this: As entrepreneurs, we should be willing to have these little failures all the time, because when we get a good hit, we’ll hit a home-run.
That's what I'm betting on.
I'm not a developer, so I'm not going to create a d'app or a game anytime soon. But I have incorporated cryptocurrencies into my business, accepting them as payment,
and I have created a treasury where I store some Bitcoin like Michael Saylor and some HIVE and HBD that earns my small business some passive income.
And I have made some NFT tickets for events. I had to give them away because people had no idea what I was doing. But I did learn that I could start a Telegram group and Discord server for the event and rain tokens using the cctip bot.
People love free crypto, lol
)
I've made a lot of decisions that have cost me a little bit of money.
I've also made some decisions that have earned me a little bit of money. I'm taking those, learning from them and fine-tuning.
If I keep at it, I might reach my B.H.A.G. (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) by 2026
You only have to be right once.
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