What’s my plan B? Don’t have one.
Having read numerous books about Neuro Linguistic Programming, I decided to give it a shot. On February 2013, when I had no idea as to how I would do it, I wrote down the following on a page in my favorite notebook:
“I will open a branch office in New York next year”
We’d already met 5 VC’s in the tech space, but none of them turned out to be a good fit for our company. The next couple of months, I just sent around 200 e-mails to various US-based investors.
Response rate: 2%. Skype calls: 2. Investment: None.
Then I decided to turn to an old friend, CEO of another tech company with whom we’d already done business before. I sent him the following e-mail:
“Serdar, why don’t you guys invest in our company? We could be partners in our American company and do business in North America.”
He said “Why not, send us a business plan and let’s talk.” 6 months later, we announced our partnership, and exactly 12 months after my first pledge, I was ready to move to United States to announce our New York office.
In the meantime, I already had another pledge in my notebook:
“We’ll be living in one of the waterfront buildings in Long Island City.”
This might not look like a big one, but considering the number of options in all five boroughs of New York and the competitive environment in the market, being able to find the exact same apartment that i was dreaming of -which was back on the market exactly 30 minutes before my wife and I went to the leasing office- kind of surprised me. I had even forgotten that I wrote that one!
Then came the life style associated with New York City: Running fast, delivering as much as possible, in as short time as possible. We started building a service called Yourbot.
This time, I went for Twitter rather than the notebook, for my pledge. Out of the blue, with no reasonable probability in sight, I risked looking a little bit cheesy (Because noone in the world except for our team knew what Yourbot was) and tweeted the following on July 19th:
Yes, the “fake news” even included a crafted Techcrunch screenshot. At the end of the day, this is how NLP works, right?
And look what I got in my inbox on September 5th:
Google did not acquire Yourbot (yet), so that’s still a “work in progress.” But I like to think that my tweet helped me bend the time-space equilibrium in our favor.
Having enjoyed experiencing with NLP so far, I decided to raise the bar.
So, here are my next three pledges:
1- Having at least 10000 followers on my Twitter account by end of December 2016, without spending a dime for it. (Currently, 6865)
2- At least 50000 pageviews on my Medium.com articles, by May 2015
3- Creating a value of at least $30,000,000.00 -most probably via the business i’ve been working for since 2007-, in the form of an investment, income or partnership by the end of January 22, 2017.
These goals might look ambitious to publicly announce. But I believe in doing, rather than trying. That’s why, I consider not having a plan B, the best way to execute your plan A.
If you want to join me in my journey, you can start by following me on Twitter.
To sum up, I’ve read so many stories about how powerful NLP can be, and I’ve already had a pretty good glimpse as to how it can turn into a valuable instrument. Will keep practicing.
