Giving up and 3 other unconventional wisdoms I’ve learned to respect
One of the realities of business — and I guess life — is that we are going to be wrong a lot more than right, but in most cases you only need to be right once to achieve the success required. It is a lottery and as humans we are bad predictors of future success and even worse at attributing past successes — where luck, skill and timing are typically ignored as contributing factor.
I have been guilty of seeking the secret sauce, from the horses mouth— but I have come to realise even the most ‘successful’ people in the world struggle to attribute their success to one single piece of ‘do this and…’ conventional wisdom.
In this piece I am going to touch on 4 unconvetional advices on business, that I have learned to respect overtime.
‘…Give up!’
Set the scene: We are in a room full of entrepreneurs at the quarterly 10x10 meetup and the first presenter gets up to walk us through his journey as an entrepreneur.
After 10 minutes or so of an insightful journey, comes his summary and learning: ‘I am big on giving up…’ and the room erupts into hysterical laughter. A great punchline, because somewhere deep down I think most of us found it refreshing to have a different perspective on how to deal with failure.
What was interesting for me, was finding out the presenter and I —unknowingly, 3 years ago — were working on a similar solution of creating a marketplace for driving instructors. Although his was specifically focused on driving instructors, mine was focused on creating a discovery mobile site for students to find things to do — particularly in the first year- and driving lessons was one of the main problems I was trying to solve.

This MVP (Instagram, Landing page + Explainer video, FB Ads @ 0.02 CPA) cost me less than £500, over 3 months and I was able to build a mailing list of over 1,000+ students waiting for the launch.
Why did I give up? A number of reasons, but in summary sh*t got real, and I needed to stop fannying about with A/B testing, content marketing and move from MVP to actually launching the product.
- Biz dev: in order to really get the idea to move forward I had to make time to contact driving instructors and convince them to get on the platform — this was out of my comfort zone, and so I avoided it.
- Imposter syndrome: kicked in as I started to feel I was trying to service a market I was no longer a part of. I found myself getting involved in petty Insta wars (being blocked) by businesses targeting students, ran by students — RED OCEAN — meanwhile this was just a side project for me.

So after a few months, I gave up on the idea. Now, you are probably thinking the reasons above are just poor excuses, because there was enough traction for me to pursue this idea.
You are probably right. I could have just partnered with a young student who is hot on biz dev, and solve the two blockers. Right?
Whenever I would hear motivational advice of ‘Don’t give up’, I would think back to this idea and many others with ‘what if?’ or ‘Did I give up too soon?’
Which I have now come to learn is not helpful, and now turn to the below advice from my wife:
‘Live your truth’ — Natalie Manima
I chose to not stress myself trying to solve a problem which was not a priority to an audience I barely knew — in a crowded market…oh yeah, and I sucked at Biz dev, but I became doper at optimisation, and I lived happily ever after.
The End.
Residual / Hindsight: This idea helped me master Facebook Ads and campaign optimisation — which I now use to deliver results for ecom clients via hustLEAN. Less crowded market (BLUE OCEAN)
‘Don’t follow your passion...’
In recent years, one of the most prominent advice to people starting out in their careers or business has been follow your passion. The rationale — as expressed by Steve Jobs — being that business is tough and if you are not passionate about what you are doing you are likely to give up.
This can probably be said for my earlier example with Unistudent.tips. I was not passionate about helping students find driving instructors, it was a market problem I found to try to fit in my need to create a marketplace business. And this is Steve Jobs, arguably the greatest founder of them all — he has to be right surely? Well maybe not.
This article argues that if Steve Jobs followed his own advice he ‘...probably find him today as one of the Los Altos Zen Center’s most popular teachers…’.
‘Dont just ask succesful people how to be successful. Watch what they do day by day…’ — Gary Vaynerchuk
The article shares learning from the book ‘So Good They Can’t Ignore You: Why Skill Trumps Passion on the Quest of What you Love’ and talks about how Steve Jobs was hardly committed to the Apple venture, and would go on self discovery trips to India in between.
‘But he didn’t follow this simple advice. Apple Computer was decidedly not born out of passion, but instead was the result of a lucky break–a “small-time” scheme that unexpectedly took off.’
The most profound argument on skill vs passion comes from Ben Horowitz in his address to Columbia University graduates.
“Don’t follow your passion...follow your contribution”.
His arguments were:
- It is hard to prioritise passion
- Passion changes over time
- His hypothesis being that people tend to become passionate about what they are good at and rewarded for it, not simply the other way around.
He goes on to suggest that it is better to start on how you can contribute (supply real demand) then you will find that with success you will become passionate about it.
‘Teams are lazy’

I first encountered this argument in a book called The Art of Thinking Clearly by Rolf Dobelli. He basically argues against the concept of ‘strength in numbers’ with the ‘social loathing’ effect.
It occurs when individual performance is not directly visible; it blends into the group effort.
Social loathing was first dicovered by a French engineer Maximilian Ringelmann in 1913. Ringelmann was studying the performance of horses and concluded that the power of two animals pulling a coach did not equal twice the power of a single horse.
When you stop and think about it social loafing is actually a rational approach, why give 100% when 25% will do in a team of 4?
The problem here is, people are not always the best at resource allocation and you end up in a situation where 80% of the work is being carried out by 20% of the group (Parento Principle).
This is also the case in product development, where you might find that users don’t care about the majority of the features developed. You then end up with technical debt slowing down the entire performance of your solution.
And when sales or performance is down, something has to give and it is usually the 80% doing the 20% of the work — which can be an expensive lesson to learn for all parties.
Which lead us perfectly to one of Ray Dalio’s 3 rule of the thumb in the ‘How the economic machine works’
‘Don’t let income rise faster than productivity’
Don’t let your income rise faster than productivity, because you will enventually become uncompetitive.
In business and product it can be easy to measure your company or personal success by the increase in revenue and usage year on year. Which in fact in some cases can be a dangerous vanity metric if the underlining performance of the product or business is heading downwards.
Year on year revenue growth could be down to the fact you are the only product in this market or maybe the aggressive sales & marketing campaign of getting more people in the funnel. But any of these can easily change quickly.
So it is good to know what is the renewal, retention, refferal rate suggesting?
Simultaneously time spent on the app or website is a false measure of engagement — it could be showing that people are finding it difficult to find what they are after for example.
This is why it is important to be aware what it is that your business or prodcut is producing — value that is being exchanged for the customers money. Use this to be of service and looking at ways you can continue to be more productive — be of more value to your customers and thus increase loyalty, during tough times.
In summary, convetional wisdom is great, as it allows us to leverage the experience of those who have gone before us. But we must avoid accepting all advice as the ‘absolute truth’ without context.
‘Don’t believe everything your earlobe captures/
It’s mostly backwards. —JayZ- Ignorant Sh*t (2009)
Which is why I expect this article to be out of date, as more people share their experiences and learning.
What an exciting time to be alive!
