The Surprisingly Simple Advice You Will Never Follow, or How To Predict The Future
The majority of people secretly feel they are non-average and statistics don’t apply to them. They think they will never get cancer, end up in a dreadful divorce or screw up their startups instead of making them another Facebook.
We almost never rely on the array of similar cases when we make plans. It always feels like our own personality makes the whole difference. We think of statistics as extraordinary dull numbers students study in colleges.
Stats have nothing to do with the future, it’s always about the past. Well, it isn’t.
This is our biggest problem. We fail without realizing why. I’ll illustrate my point with 3 short stories.
STORY #1. Dating with Red Flags
A good school friend of mine stumbled into a good-looking guy in the Italian cafe. Their eye contact lasted a few seconds. She was spending her summer vacation in Rome, he got there God knew why, so it was natural for them to get in touch on Facebook later.
They skyped days and nights long. He called her habibi and all other stuff women fall into, so she finally decided to come to his country for a visit.
She was 25 then and she thought it was a romantic beginning of something. We asked her, “Isn’t it too soon to declare one’s love over Skype after seeing each other once for 10 minutes at most?” She answered, “No. It’s love at first sight.”
We didn’t want her to go abroad alone to meet with a stranger. People get abducted, after all, and victims are not just kids, whores and the rich. She didn’t care.
She also neglected the fact that “in many cases victims are unaware of what fate is in store for them. Human trafficking can take several forms: trafficking for sexual exploitation; forced labor; forced theft, begging; and trafficking for the purpose of domestic slavery” (reported by the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime).
Eventually, she got back home with a broken heart. The guy was dating someone else. To my mind, she was one hell of a lucky girl.
Story #2. “I Should Have Listened”
The best way to tell this story will be to reproduce our talk with the client of Kraftblick — Taylor from Salt Lake City.
Taylor: I only got 3 hours of sleep last night :( problems happened.
Me: What happened?
Taylor: Ugh I should not have hired people from India. That was my first mistake that I will never make again.
I needed a site done for a client by this morning, and they said yes, so I went to bed very late after going through all the questions of the final revisions to make before we transferred to the live server.
And of course they did not. I got woken up by client around 6 am my time since they are eastern time zone. So I had to then figure out emergency plan to do it.
You can tell I have prejudice, but outsources never do a good job. Never make the same mistake twice. I should have listened. I kept trusting and hoping it was my fault they weren’t succeeding. I was just wrong.
Taylor was not the only one failing in outsourcing. IBM, J.P. Morgan, Virgin Airlines and Royal Bank of Scotland kept him a company.
Story #3. Overconfidence Hurts
I have to admit I didn’t think that being an entrepreneur will be so hard. I didn’t realize that we will literally have to fight statistics to stay afloat.
When we started our company, we were full of hopes. We loved marketing and analytics and we were hard workers. It wasn’t enough.
It’s now as clear as day to me that we overestimated our talents and underestimated time needed to grow a company.
I attribute our planning fallacy to two factors: we lacked many necessary skills to run a company (the minor reason) and there were so many things we couldn’t control (the major one).
Employees quit because they fell in love and left the country, went to study abroad or wanted to travel more than they wanted to work. Clients terminated contracts because they hired marketing managers in-house. Internal files got lost because Dropbox didn’t sync.
Harvard University researchers revealed, that “first-time entrepreneurs have only an 18% chance of succeeding”. This piece of stats provides startup business failure rates: 25%, 36%, 44% for every year of operation accordingly.
If I cared about giving more thought to it, I would have trained my endurance for a long distance running, not a sprint.
This Surprisingly Simple Advice Is…
There are millions of people who have already done whatever you are now doing and gone through whatever you are living through. Some of them succeeded, some of them made critical mistakes and all of them became part of the history. Now they constitute what we commonly call ‘statistics’.
While feelings and beliefs are yet to be proved, find out what category your life story belongs to and obtain statistics for it. Use reliable sources of information (e.g. data from the government) over social networks.
In most cases statistics will be unfavorable such as the divorce rate in the US. Swallow your sadness and take the rose-colored glasses off. Welcome home from Fantasyland.
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My team and I deal with marketing every single day. We’ve discovered a number of secrets and little-known facts and we can’t help sharing them. Visit Kraftblick blog and say ‘hi’ to us. See you there!
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