Archives 2021

Because deciding to integrate friction and struggle into your life intentionally, forever, is not easy.

I mean, why would you do such a thing?

Fear will scream. Comfort will protest. Survival instincts will tie your feet. Others will try to dissuade you out of your conviction.

And after defeating all that obstacles, it just might not work. All your efforts could lead to a failure.

But you know you have no choice. And when you realize you have no other alternative, things, ironically, get easier.

Besides, having defeated all the obstacles mentioned above, will in itself be a victory.

Yeah, yeah, there is no one like you.

Your company is the only one that…your product is unique because…

When you go to your porter analysis and you are filling the competition slot, and you have the nerve to say “I may have substitutes but I have no competition”…well you have started with the wrong foot. The chances of not having competition are the same as you becoming the next Elon.

The only way to achieve a position with less and less competition is to narrow your target audience.

Performing the exercise of getting to know deeply your target will unavoidably lead you to leave a lot of people out of your scope. But hat is fine.

You can’t know intimately everybody and you can’t serve exceptionally everybody.

First you will have to awe a very selected group of people, then with that leverage, you may expand your offer to adjacent groups of people, with real, tangible differences over your competitors.

As you grow older, there will be a lot of things you didn’t become.

Things you wanted to be, but that you were not, and will never be.

As they stack up, the weight grows bigger and bigger. It might be as well a chain around our necks. It certainly feels that way.

But our brain plasticity gives us a chance to put the chain aside and see our present as a never ending starting point. There are lots of things you didn’t become, but there is even more things you still could be.

Takes courage to let go all those sunk costs, and not doing it will prove itself dramatically more costly.

But if you manage to let go, possibilities are endless.

Is called Google.

They are not a search engine. They are an advertising company, that happened to kill the information delivery industries in order to be able to advertise.

It became part of their business model as a natural way of searching for news but they were aiming to show people web sites related to their search.

There could be nuances on the way your company strategy has been defined.

You could provide some service or product unrelated to your original scope leveraging them with your current structure.

Even though sometimes people stumble upon a veiled opportunity, something they weren’t even looking for, this is relying on luck to identify said opportunity and act upon it.

It is always better to actively search patterns out of the habitual modus operandi of your company to find unexpected ways to grow.

In a research, a kind show of strength contest between two mice, they were forced into a tube to push one another in order to reach the opposite exit.

The winner kept winning and winning, even if they had similar body weight and physical features.

Once the researchers helped the loosing mouse, pushing him from behind a few times to win, he developed a winner mentality and started winning by himself.

So forcing yourself to win, pushing from behind is kind of hard, but you can force yourself to find little wins hidden in bad days.

Is a training exercise for your brain.

When you find yourself winning, your brain register that event and creates a framework for himself to make decisions in the future.

It means that if you are facing a situation with a given amount of risk involved, your brain will ponder differently the odds at winning this time based on the past winning events: if you have won consistently in the past, you will probably win this time also.

What advantage is derived from this? Well, it will give you a time frame edge, since the winners will hesitate less, they will move first.

It will also give you an “entitlement edge”, because if you are a winner, you deserve the desired outcome, and if someone or something is threatening what is yours by right, then you will fight harder to maintain or get what you deserve.

Forcing yourself to find and enjoy micro wins, wins hidden in catastrophes and wins that may seem irrelevant, will help you build that winner stack, tricking your brain.

You will be training yourself to be the winner just like the little mouse in the tube contest.

Immediate, candid, human interaction.

Turning in your seat and saying “hello!”.

Or arriving to the lobby of the hotel and start looking for the badge hanging on people’s neck exhibiting that they and you, are part of something and that you have the permission to approach them and to be open to them.

The interaction that creates valuable networking, that builds long and lasting relationships because just by attending you kind of speak “the same language” as others attendees, making them part of the same subculture.

The kind of spontaneous interaction that can be described as “good feeling” about someone. And then trust, and support, and momentum arises…Such things are kind of hard to activate through zoom.

Although, AR & VR are coming…

I have goosebumps while writing these lines.

SpaceX, that company that almost disappeared in 2008, today has achieved something awesome: Starship SN10, a shiny retro looking rocket, was launched, turned to fall belly first, and then landed beautifully to be reused again.

It is amazing and inspiring. Just the thought of humanity becoming interplanetary, for us GenXers (growing up with StarWars and StarTrek, and lots of other science fiction authors like the amazing Douglas Adams) it is life getting us closer to our dreams.

Kudos Elon and SpaceX. Thanks again for pushing the boundaries of what is possible.

Humanity can barely peek the real impact of your achievements.

The future looks a little brighter for all of us today.

A risk junkie belongs somewhere else, not in business.

It should always be about purpose, not the neuro transmitter cocktail released by gambling. If the thrill is more important than a continuing business, eventually, reality will come.

On the other hand, if you have an absolute intolerance to risk you will amount to nothing. Playing it safe all the time will never bring outstanding achievements.

Yep, it may sound like a contradiction but it is more like a balance.

Ideas, today, have zero value.

Ideas are spawned by the millions and almost nobody act upon the ideas they have.

Excuses will come and stop a huge percentage of those people. Feelings of inadequacy will keep another big chunk. And life will derail those who have managed to try but faint-heartedly.

The tiny group of people that keep going no matter what, those will actually change the course of the world.

Execution is everything.

If you have the fortune to cross paths with somebody that can execute upon ideas, you’ve found gold. Stick to them. Become them.

So you watched grey’s anatomy. And maybe how I met your mother. Let’s not even talk about game of thrones.

If you are the average person, you’ve spent between 5 to 6 hours a day watching video content, mostly series and other kinds of entertainment.

And you complain about lack of opportunities. I mean, come on.

How about you skip the next season of your top 3 shows and start building a new skill? Sounds too much? Too hard?

You don’t need those 10,000 hours they talk about. You only need to stop wasting time.

Talking about all those hours binge watching shows, here’s a spoiler: sooner or later you’ll regret all those wasted hours-turned-into-years.