Dispersed knowledge is the answer to success!
Entrepreneurship is perhaps one of the most difficult and for sure one the most exciting human adventures. It takes so much effort, so much energy to get started.
It’s not surprising that the most common icon for startups is a rocket. We commonly link rockets to startups due to their trajectory. Rockets and startups share the same path, they get altitude very quickly.
That’s actually the definition of startup. High growth. This is becoming technically easy to do, due to scalability improvement.
Furthermore, entrepreneurship is like rocket-science. There are so many parameters and anything can go wrong in a blink of an eye. In the outer space, you make one mistake and you’re dead.
Before launching your startup like a rocket, here are some of the best pieces of advice you may find.
1. Do not follow any advice
The best advice a young entrepreneur should get: DO NOT FOLLOW ANY!
It might look silly to you but it’s actually very wise.
What is an advice? An advice is a piece of information supposed to help you in very specific context.
The first criteria of success for venture is not money, nor the team, nor the idea, but the timing.
Timing is the key here. Given the fact that timing is a key driver of success, you should have in mind that all pieces of advice you receive are context-specific. Time affects mechanically the context. It’s very likely that you receive an obsolete or outdated piece of advice. So this kind of advice can turn out to be harmful…
It’s like your grandfather telling you to watch out at the border with Germany… Nazis are coming. This was very true 80 years ago. Today, it’s not anymore.
What should a young entrepreneur know?
Getting a mentor is great. But getting only one is too dangerous. It can drain you down or worse, push you to make silly mistake. Moreover, a mentor will make you become himself, because of his aura and influence over you.
Nobody wants to be someone else. You want to be yourself. Alas, if you fail, you would rather want to fail because of yourself than because of following a stupid advice from a successful entrepreneur, who wrote a book and gave advice to fill his free time….
2. Books are good advisers, but they don’t solve the problem
Books are as a group of mentors: wise people have written books… get your own benchmark. Reading is not a waste of time.
However, the knowledge available is wast. We produce tons of it each second. There is no way you can read fast enough to catch up. So you will need to ask for help. Put an accent on quality over quantity… It’s easy to produce content… That’s why 90% of things you can find online is crap!
The majority of successful entrepreneurs will tell you there is no manual or book to succeed and this is very true. Given the factor of timing, a book explaining how to successfully launch a business will be obsolete rapidly.
Be careful of excessive storytelling and keep your sense critique. A lot of entrepreneurs, especially in the USA are using storytelling excessively. Storytelling is playing a fair game. You want to depict yourself and your company with the most compelling story.
3. The answer is in dispersed knowledge
If we discard the individual advice and books — not to underestimate their value — the only way to survive in the fast moving environment is relying on dispersed knowledge, which lies in the wisdom of the crowd.
According to Friedrich Hayek’s theory, dispersed knowledge in economics is the notion that no single agent has information as to all of the factors which influence prices and production throughout the system. Each agent in a market for assets, goods, or services possesses incomplete knowledge as to most of the factors which affect prices in that market.
John Stuart Mill states that individuals throughout the economy, acting independently, can make better use of dispersed knowledge than could a centralized agency.
This brings me to my point — if every individual has some knowledge, but incomplete, reaching the biggest possible number of individuals can provide us with the most complete knowledge.
In the first place, you get the necessary knowledge/advice very fast and what’s more, it’s context-specific. As long as they are provided with good incentives-financial, reputation or other- people are very motivated to help you. You need no experts, the accent is rather on the wisdom of a very excessive group of people of different backgrounds. You get to know all the perspectives and all the possible approaches to the solution of a problem. The answer can come from the advice of the person you least expected. That is why you should keep your options open!
Crowd-consulting is the future. Dispersed knowledge covering a wide range of fields is the answer. The picture we get is very broad, almost complete, covering each and every aspect of what we need.
In a collective intelligence platform such as for example Brainsfeed, you make your own decision, and if you make a mistake, it’s your own mistake. On a platform like this, you efficiently gather the information you need in no time.
This is very enriching as it’s like gathering ideas from a large number of books, which otherwise you would not have time to read. What collective intelligence platform brings us is dispersed knowledge, numerous perspectives and multiple solutions suggested in no time.
Not each and every advice will be relevant. Actually very few of them will. However, maybe precisely those few will come from the persons we would otherwise not even have in mind. It is about widening our options and broadening our horizons.
Let’s get this straight, the causality between dispersed knowledge and success will not appear in 100% of cases. But I think it is the most reliable correlation that could lead an entrepreneur to success. In order to succeed, the entrepreneur needs a good feedback, and the most complete feedback lies in dispersed knowledge.
About: Brainsfeed is a Crowd-Consulting platform powered by AI that leverages cognitive diversity for better results. Register here