Entrepreneurial lessons from my trip to Paris (2013)
— This post was written in 2013 and got forgotten, it’s old one but still has some wisdom, hopefully. —
I’m waiting this while Waiting for my delayed flight from Paris to Rome. I was supposed to be in Rome four hours ago! Thanks to Kuwait Airways for messing up my schedule. Although that the delay of my flight can make a very interesting topic, that’s not what I want to communicate thru this post. What I really want to share is a valuable lesson that I learned from visiting Paris and attending LeWeb 2013. So here you go.
Lesson: Learning a foreign language while at home is like building a product in a vacuum.
Couple years ago, I have put so much time and effort in learning the French language. I spent six months with a private tutor and rehearsed countless number of conversations and songs. However, when I was in Paris, I used French to ask a very specific question “Do you speak English?”. Why did that happen?
Most of what I know in French is based on certain scenarios that I’ve created in my mind. I spent endless hours practicing my scenarios dialogs and became good at them. Yet, when that scenario changed, even slightly, my whole structure has fallen apart. So, how is that related to building products?
It’s exactly the same, you ,as an inventor, spend long time perfecting your product based on a certain use cases. You become confident. You think your product will change the way humans do things. You really appreciate the results you’re getting in the closed testing environment. Everything is going smoothly and you feel ready to ship it to the market. However, when you ship it, you start to see different results. You think it’s temporary. Most important, you don’t have neither the capacity and well to iterate and change it after all the effort spent on it. Your fantastic scenarios are not taking place. You get worried and start making excuses; “It should work that way!” or “I didn’t think this will happen!” those are common phrases to hear when things go into you vaccum-generated results.
What’s the solution?
Exactly as learning a language, creating pre-set scenarios is only going to give you false confidence. I thought I was intermediate level in French. Only because I memorized certain scenarios. After coming to Paris, I found that an early stage beginner, who can ask others to speak in English in a very good French. The best way to learn a language that you can actually use is to put yourself in real life scenarios. The same thing is for products, you can’t build great products with pre-set scenarios and expect them to just work. Get disappointed early in the process, to avoid it at the end of it.
