These years of entrepreneurship, an eternal proposition is the choice and give up.
Over the years, I’ve worked with senior engineers with lots of choices, entrepreneurs with lots of good intentions, middle-level companies who don’t want to get their hands dirty, and path-dependent partners. Objectively speaking, I am just a traveler in this world, I am not the center of the world.
Since I do not have the ability to jump out of the coordinates of self-understanding and uncover the “true face”, I can only talk about the thinking and logic before and after the choice in the personal coordinate system.
On The 13th, NIO and PDD rose sharply in THE US stock market. NIO’s highest rise was too surprising, while PDD rose and fell. I even wondered whether many people would regret not investing in them after many years.
Jeff Bezos came up with the Regret Minimization Model, or regret Minimization framework, after watching Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day at home before he founded Amazon from his lucrative and comfortable job as a vice president on Wall Street. Regret Minimization Framework), later he figured it out and officially left Wall Street, began the journey of entrepreneurship. After reading the book, which is a longtime manager’s recollection of his life, Bezos concluded that “the regret minimization model,” which means that any decision we make is likely to end up regretting, but given multiple choices, we should choose the one that makes us regret the least.
‘If I look back when I’m 80, I won’t regret giving up the perks of Wall Street,’ Mr. Bezos, an elite entrepreneur, later said. ‘I’ll certainly regret not being part of the Internet boom.’
People the most painful is that there are multiple choice is correct, some fear to make a decision, wait until other possibilities disappear, after selecting some hasty ineffective use time, few people in their twenties when try to think in final dimension to think about when yourself into a 80 – year – old’s analyse of gain and loss.
A lot of people want to take a long view when making decisions, but what is the long view, just an extended period of time? I think there are three steps in the long term selection methodology:
1. Think in the final dimension and choose the path with the least regret
Standing in the perspective of the end of life, looking back on the road, choose the one with the least regret. By contrast, at the end of his 80’s, the elite, like Bezos, would have stayed on Wall Street. He might have been a successful, hard-working man, but he would certainly have lost the chance to ride the waves of the new technological cycle and would have been a spectator on the shore.
2. Believe and justify your choices with results
After making the first choice, the second choice in life also appeared painfully. One is to try to prove that the choice was right at that time. The other is to give up and try again in a new way. Bezos wrote an annual shareholder letter, repeatedly convincing the capital markets that he was embracing a new business model, one that managed shareholders’ business and investment expectations well, and one that made money not directly from deals but from continuing to serve customers.
In more than two decades of amazon shareholder letters, a copy of amazon’s first letter from 1997 is at the back of each letter, which reads, “If we had to choose between the beauty of the company’s financial statements and free cash flow, we believe the company’s core focus should be free cash flow.” It’s a way for Bezos to reiterate to shareholders that what he wants to do has not changed.
Bezos was ruthless enough to build a corporate moat around 20 years of unprofitable self-loss. When the dotcom bubble burst in 2000 and Amazon lost 80% of its value, Bezos gleefully told shareholders, ‘The stock price is down, but rest assured, our business is super healthy.’
There are many choices for everyone, and it’s important that you, like Bezos, try to justify that choice. This process of effort, accompanied by countless questions, is also the process of your personal transformation. Many people make choices, but are not ready to change. I’ve seen the metamorphosis of many entrepreneurs along the way, which confirms my belief that the future belongs to those who are still willing to get their hands dirty.
Once you make the choice you want to do, do the work you want to do, it is necessary to work hard to do, do not be afraid of trouble, do not be afraid of dirty hands, there will be nothing you can not do in the future.
3. Get rid of path dependence
The third choice difficulty is path dependence. In the Innovator’s Dilemma, American management scientist Christensen put forward a concept called “disruptive innovation”. The idea is that the more successful a company is in development, it will be bound by its previous successful experience when facing new technologies, and eventually become obsolete. The more successful we have been in the past, the more likely we will be in the future. To stay ahead, we must take the initiative to disrupt ourselves.
Tell me about myself. In the mazes of the business and technology worlds, a good founder should be able to predict which turns will make the company rich and which will lead to its demise. The founder of a bad, will only blindly toward one by one all kinds of brand of the maze entrance, entrance on social knowledge pay, strangers, VR, games, movies, music, file sharing, P2P or social picture, etc., without considering the history of the industry, the players already in the maze, the number of casualties in the past, Or whether there is technology that can break down walls and change the status quo.
If I want to avoid becoming the latter, I need to spend time and energy to study and mine history, data or direct experience, and strive to improve the trial-and-error efficiency of the enterprise.
This involves moving out of your comfort zone into no man’s land with no experience at all, and companies need someone to do the trial and error drudgery. I think the drudgery that a business is going to do is defining the future of the business. Greg Graham, founder of YC, calls it the hate blind spot. He says drudgery is like a cold swimming pool. There’s only one way to deal with it: jump in.
In fact, the most difficult thing to defeat is yourself. Engaging in what you are not good at means facing doubts and staying at the end of the chain of contempt. I often have to face this situation. For example, PRACTICING writing, speaking, engaging in business development, building brand influence and so on, all of which I have never done, but now I will continue to work hard. I had tried to get someone else to pick up the slack, but now I found myself having to dig my own way out of the hole. For everyone else, the practice was even more difficult, and worse, being questioned and despised.
conclusion
Dream big and plan short, as Sandberg advised. Short-term planning isn’t about what you accomplish, but how you help others succeed and learn from it. “Investing not only in yourself, but in the success of others and your team. That’s an investment that will pay off well later in your career.” I think this is the perspective we must have when facing new challenges and choosing old paths. If you have the opportunity to choose, take the challenging path, because this is the key to making the difference between your future self and your present self, and the way up.
As we get older and face more and more options, heart is more important than brain, especially when you choose a difficult path, you must not give up, even if the heart is weak, you must also bite your teeth to cheer yourself up.
Finally, as you may have noticed, I often advocate designing and upgrading your own operating system. I hope this will give you some insight into your choices.
Andy Reed Technology founder and CEO
Reed Technology – Guangzhou professional software outsourcing service company to provide wechat small program, APP application research and development, UI design and other professional services, Concentrate on the Internet product consulting, brand design, technology research and development and other fields Click to visit www.talkmoney.cn for more universal manual | early diary Lite | | bump wallpaper goods