On Contradicting Advice from Smart People
And What to Do When Everyone is Right But You
One of the greatest skills any entrepreneur must learn to develop is the power of discernment.
In a start-up, you will never, ever have time to do everything. So you must prioritize. You must learn to accomplish what is critical, and disregard what is not.
But perhaps the harder challenge than execution, is deciding what to execute.
Because, again, you can’t do it all.
And a great way on deciding, is to ask advice of those who have tread similar paths.
The greatest challenge of them all, then, is deciding who you listen to, as no one has tread the same path that you have, or ventured down the same road that you will.
So one of the most important skills any entrepreneur will develop is learning how to manage and deal with conflicting advice from different mentors.
For example:
One mentor we had told us the be all and end all for hardware start-ups, and any start-up in general, is iteration — plan your idea, make a simple MVP, prove the concept in front of your audience, and repeat — and to create our MVP with what we had then and there. The prototype would have cost probably $300 but would be nowhere close to polished or professional in its appearance.
Our other mentor recommended that before we pay for any design, to think through every little detail and plan out the entire process — find suppliers, figure out cost effectiveness, design for manufacturing, optimize shipping — the whole nine yards — and then build as finished a product we can without regard for cost. It would have probably cost closer to $5000, which was a significant portion of our company savings at that point.
So we were stuck with a dilemma — make a crappy product and show it off to people, possibly tarnishing our brand before we can demonstrate our concept fully — or make a finished, production-ready product we were not sure would sell for a huge part of our budget.
Many people have differing opinions on this. Iterate, iterate, iterate. Validate your designs. Test everything. But don’t make a crappy product. Make something people want. Design for your user.
So what happens if your users want high class, expensive stuff? What if your prototype is exceptionally expensive and you don’t have the cash? What if proving the concept is expensive, difficult, and is a systems-level solution that requires all the parts to work together.
The name of the game here is to learn to determine what information is useful for your situation and what is not.
All of the start-up books you will read contain excellent advice, but none of them are the Holy Bible of start-ups — take or leave whatever is good for your situation.
We didn’t make a perfect prototype. And we didn’t make a crappy MVP either. We went somewhere in the middle, and it made all the difference. We skimped on the parts that wouldn’t influence a decision, and really built out the stuff that mattered. A little Hollywood magic and we pulled it through.
But this still leaves the question: how do you develop this power of discernment? How do you manage contradicting advice from smart people?
Here’s a simple strategy.
- Distill all advice down to a few key points. These should be bullet points that would fit on a cue card. They don’t necessary have to be big, generic points — they can be specific small things — but write them down.
- Understand the “why” — why is this piece of advice useful? Why did the person give the advice? What was the wisdom in this nugget of information? I find it useful to break the cue-card into portions with wisdom and the “why” factor written after in a different colour.
- Lastly, and perhaps most important — answer the three-pronged question: Why is this useful for you? What about this advice can you utilize? How would you implement it? Why — What — How — Start big, move small and localized.
Perhaps as a final check, I would recommend doing a simple Pros-Cons list or a forecast analyst — in its basic form: draw out what it looks like if you took one piece of advice over another.
Does it make a big change?
Does it even make a difference?
One of my favourite articles ever on decision making is by Seth Godin and can be found here.
The skill of discernment is one that is learned over years and years of hard work and experience — honestly, nothing else will get you there — but having a framework on which you can evaluate decisions is a great starting point.
At the end of the day, getting advice about entrepreneurship is kind of like asking people their advice on politics, finance or religion — everyone has something different to say.
And most importantly, accept that you are going to make mistakes, you will royally screw something up at some point, and you’re going to do things you wish you didn’t and miss opportunities you wish you had taken.
That’s the nature of this game.
Get over it, be humble, and keep moving forward.
Be mindful of the advice you take, and realize that not all advice is good advice. There is seldom bad advice given intentionally, but understand that everyone has their particular lens under which they see the world, and though their advice may not be bad for some people, it may not be for you in your particular situation.
Be mindful. Be open. But in the end, decide what is best for you and your situation.
Take everything with a grain of salt. And, if you can manage it, a shot of tequila.
Cheers,
Brendan
Follow and Recommend
Want more articles like this? Follow and recommend below!
And check out more at our publication @VentureforCanadaFellows
Social It Up
Hit me up on social media, and check us out at BoogalooBunks.com
Twitter: @bk2coady
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brendan.coady.15
Instagram: @bk2coady
