This is mostly a message for Green and anyone else with that
killer idea.
We all want to get our selves into business which are likely to be successful. The typical process starts with someone getting that eureka moment on their way home or something like that, such as the case with
this post and Chuck Tailor shoes.
Then, the person would try to get some kind of information and figure out whether the idea is any good or not. That's where the problem starts. The human brain suffers from this thing called a
confirmation bias. In other words, even though your typical advice for an aspiring entrepreneur would be to do some market research- this step is usually pretty useless because the only information you're gonna end up paying attention to is the kind that confirms your original idea. You can end up seeing tons of research telling you the idea is no good, but the only thing you're gonna be interested in is the stuff that tells you that you are right rather than wrong.
Who cares? What confirmation bias means is that if you have an idea, there is no point to try to research it because you're only going to look for positive information, so you might as well stop wasting time and start the business.
Unpredictability Many people would assume that they can predict how a venture would turn out, that's why people write business plans or try to gather other information to try and predict how a business is likely to work out. The reality of commerce is a lot to different to that. How an outcome of a venture is determined is influenced highly by randomness- in other words, luck.
For example: Imagine if I told you that a 17 year old, college-bound kid put up a web page with a giant grid on it. Let’s say he offered to sell squares on the grid — each 10 pixels x 10 pixels — for $1 per pixel (or $100 per square). How many could he sell? If you’re like me, you’d probably guess zero. Or maybe a handful to some friends as a gimmick. Well, you’d be wrong. Very wrong.
As of today, Alex has sold $453,600 worth of pixels on his site,
The Million Dollar Homepage . That’s real money! The way things are going, Alex will make his 1 million dollars in for a total of 5 months of work. Most of it will be net profit, so that’s the same as building a company with 10-15 million dollar revenues.
If Alex had asked for advice whether his was a good business idea, people would have laughed at him. Why- because venture outcomes are largely impossible to predict.
More examples: This reality, businesses exist within a chaotic system where outcomes are more determined by randomness is illustrated in other instances.
Revenues and earnings for large and small companies are never the same as those made out in forecasts. Likewise, even companies like Google or Ebay, which seemed like completely improbably businesses when people were starting them, actually worked out to be pretty worthwhile.
The Point of all this: Entrepreneurship is a game of luck
more than a game of skill. Skill is important, but randomness is also important. If you understand this, there are one of two decisions which you can make to improve your chances of making it big.
Persistence: If you stick it out with one business for long enough, I am talking 10 years long, there is a very good chance that during this time something will happen and you'll be successful. The point is to structure your business that you don't go bust if something bad happens and that you can keep going.
Multiple tries: Entrepreneurship is like throwing dice. If you've done it often enough, snake eyes are gonna come up. In other words, the value of finding the
killer idea is not nearly as important as being able to start and execute ventures very quickly and move on. This is very difficult- but that's
the skill entrepreneurs should be learning. It's a very specific skill.
(very eagerly too). 
.
Linear Mode
