Entrepreneurship Is Calculus, Not Statistics
I’ve written about the importance of statistics on several occasions. I even dedicated a full week to the topic when covering the fabulous book Naked Statistics by Charles Wheelan (here’s the book review). And whether it’s the importance of understanding randomness a’la Nassim Taleb’s Fooled By Randomness (here’s the book review) or the desperate need for us all to adopt a framework for probablistic thinking (as written here), the concepts within statistics matter a great deal. Obviously, I value it.
Maybe a little too much.
This week’s book is Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things. It is a book of genuine truths, many of which I already know and prefer to avoid, such as the idea that “no one cares”. These truths hit me like a mild slap in the face, waking me up from all the overthinking that I tend to do. And even though it hurts at first, these truths ultimately reinvigorate. So let’s drop another one from his book:
Startup CEOs should not play the odds. When you are building a company, you must believe there is an answer and you cannot pay attention to your odds of finding it. You just have to find it. It matters not whether your chances are nine in ten or one in a thousand; your task is the same.
This is the part where you might say to yourself “I don’t run a startup” or “I’m…
