William Wu Personal Blog

When working in a startup, one of the things that I learned is how to live with imperfection. 

Imperfection is such a hard thing for people that have been taught since they were a little kid growing up to be “best” of whatever he or she decided to pursue.  This type of logic confounds A-student managers in big company. A’s are great.  B’s are good.  A’s are success.  B’s are survival.  A-student cannot allow their perfectionist minds to settle for good, they need great.  But start-ups move too fast for greatness.  Greatness, and the deliberate, perfectly-thought-through decision making that greatness demands, is for companies like General Electric and alike.  Startups move more swiftly than established corporations.  They don’t have time to consider everything carefully or to perfect their product.

One of the famous quote by Jim Collins’s book Good To Great is “Good is the Enemy of Great“.Â

It basically points out how to evolve an ordinary somewhat established company to create extraordinary breakthrough via a disciplined approach.  However, greatness may be the wrong thing for entrepreneurs to strive for - at least at the startup stage.  Being great means spending extra effort to perfect a solution and not settle for a 80/20 rule.  The last 20% perfection, as we know, can take 80% of the effort to get to.   There are so many things and opportunities that a startup can focus on and knowing what not to do is typically the hardest thing.  Wasting time to perfect something could mean not having time to invest in other areas that need innovation.  Therefore, a good decision made quickly is far better than a great decision made slowly. 

Be definition, every startup can be improved upon and most of the improvements happen between the first incarnation of a company and the tenth.  Maybe by then, the company might well be considered great.  In a way, “Great Is the Enemy of Good” for startups.  Success in startup is not being great, but being around tomorrow and a lot of days in a row.  A startup should never let the perfectionist mind slow down their innovation pace and be too internally focused and forget about the importance of creating innovative and good solutions that customers and clients are willing to pay for.

Perhaps a great way to be successful is to exercise a little patience and to remember “The greatest oak was once a little nut who held it’s ground.“

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Successful entrepreneurs - are they made or are they born?  Are they in the right place at the right time or do they make things happen?  Bo Peabody in his book “Lucky or Smart? Secrets to an Entrepreneurial Life” has a good way of looking at it.Â

In essence, business luck is different than regular old luck (e.g. finding a $100 bill on the street or getting a million $ lottery). However, when people got lucky in business, they are often convinced it is not luck but their own blinding brilliance.  An entrepreneur must not be confused “being lucky” with “being smart“.  The big difference between “business luck” and “everyday luck” is that “business luck” can be created, while “everyday luck” cannot. You can not will yourself to find a $100 bill on the street, but you can create a company that gets lucky more often than your average company.  Lucky things happen to entrepreneurs who start fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive companies.

When smart, inspired people gather around a fundamentally innovative, morally compelling, and philosophically positive company, they work very hard and serendipity ensures. 

Serendipity - the faculty of making fortuitous discoveries by chance - causes lots of unexpected things to happen to a company.  Some of these unexpected things are good.  Some are bad.  But because no one planned for the good things to happen, they appear as luck.  In other words, the best way to ensure that lucky things happen is to make sure that a lot of things happen.  In applying this formula, the entrepreneur has two tasks:

1. Create an environment where smart people will gather;
2. Be smart enough to stay out of the way and let luck happen.

Good entrepreneurs are not, per se, lucky or smart.  They are just smart enough to realize when they are getting lucky.

Luck is best viewed as when opportunity knocks and you answer. As Thomas Jefferson put it, “I’m a great believer in luck and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.”

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Just came back from the holiday break in India.  What an incredible country to see and experience both in culture, diversity and scenery! During the trip, I picked up a few books by the local Indian authors that shared their great thoughts on life.  One book “The 10 Rules of Happiness” by Mridula Agarwal summarized well on the basic ingredients to live a happy and content life. 

According to Ms. Agarwal, Happiness can only be achieved from within.  No amount of success can bring us happiness or satisfaction if we do not have inner peace.  

Success, we know, is an ingredient necessary for happiness but we also know that it is not enough in itself and does not bring peace of mind along with it if it has not been obtained right.  At the same time, it is not possible for an unsuccessful man to feel happy for long if he feels like a failure within.  But success obtained at the cost of everything else is expensive, too.  And, as is the case with every overpaid thing, the realization of having overpaid makes us feel cheated; it robs us of the satisfaction of having it at all.  It can only bring pain, not happiness.  As Bertrand Russell has said, “Success can only be one ingredient in happiness, and is too dearly purchased if all other ingredients have been sacrificed to obtain it.”

True and fulling happiness can result only when our work and achievements are in accordance with our value systems and the meaning we have given to our lives.  This is what plays an important role in our inner sense of fulfillment and peache within.  Perhaps a good summary on how to put success and happiness in perspective is the quote from Art Linkletter, “Things turn out best for those who make the best of how things turn out.”�

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