Tag / purple space

by Nathan Coumbe

Why do we diminish our work?

An acquaintance of mine in Seth Godin’s Purple Space Community announced a new project. It was one I never would have thought of, yet still found fascinating and potentially life-changing for some people.

But he ended his announcement by saying, “I know it’s not significant or anything…”

Why do we do that? Why, when we embark on a new journey or start something new, do we diminish it from the outset?

Because we’re afraid it might not work.

Because we don’t want to feel a sense of letdown.

Because we equate “significance” with the size of the impact, not the impact itself.

Significance: the quality of being worthy of attention; importance.

Nowhere in that definition does it say anything about being worthy of attention to a large number of people. It just says “worthy of attention.” And if it’s worthy of attention to a few people, that makes it significant to those people!

I shared with him the Tale of the Starfish:

A young girl was walking along a beach where thousands of starfish had washed up during a storm. When she came to a starfish, she picked it up and threw it back into the ocean.

A man approached her and said, “Little girl, why are you doing this? You can’t save them all. You can’t begin to make a difference!”

The girl picked up another starfish and hurled it into the ocean. Then she looked up at the man and replied, “Well, I made a difference for that one!”

by Nathan Coumbe

The secret approach to bootstrapping

You can be an entrepreneur: someone who builds something big, hires lots of people to do the work, and gets a ton of start-up money from investors.

Or you can be a freelancer: a skilled craftsperson who does high-quality work directly for clients.

But there’s a third option: bootstrapping.

To bootstrap a business is to find a group of customers with a problem who are so willing for you to solve it that they will pay you up front to build the business that will solve it for them.

And the secret to bootstrapping that many up-and-coming business people don’t know is that you don’t necessarily have to have the solution to the problem.

You simply have to see the problem, empathize with the people who have it, and trust yourself to know that you can and will figure out a solution that works.1

Why does this approach matter? Because smart, solution-oriented people often get so bogged down in the details of how to solve a problem that they never do the hard work of finding customers with a problem that needs solving.

So, find people who need help first, then figure out how to solve the issue.

(H/t to Seth Godin and the folks over at Purple Space)

  1. Don’t lie to people and tell them you can solve their problem, then take their money and run. That’s not bootstrapping – that’s a con. ↩︎