Other People's Numbers

Not all good ideas are good business ideas. Good business ideas require the ability to control supply and demand. To create shape and form around an idea through barriers to entry. Demand is not good enough if supply is a free for all. It is easier to control things when you can reduce them to numbers. Which is why STEM areas (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Maths) typically make better business ideas. They focus on areas that are easier to box into products that can be paid for. A clear ask. A clear offer. Not everything can be boxed. Even good business ideas will be exposed to qualitative questions that cannot be reduced to numbers for comparison. You can force anything into a 1-5 ranking or a Yes/No binary. That is often useful just to force you to think about something, but then you have to avoid being seduced by the numbers. Falling in love with the illusion of control so much that you forget that numbers make better questions than answers. Especially when they are other people’s numbers, and you did not do the work yourself.

Not all Ones and Zeros

Plan for Being Wrong

This Covid crisis was not a Black Swan. A Black Swan is something that has never been seen before, and all the evidence has been in the other direction. Every White Swan increases the conviction that all Swans are white. All the evidence confirms a belief that is fundamentally wrong. There have been pandemics before, and there were plenty of people talking about it before 2019. Hans Rosling’s book “Factfulness” (2018) listed Pandemic as one of the 5 big risks the world faces, along with Poverty, Financial Meltdown, Climate Change and World War. Financial Meltdown, Poverty, Climate Change and War are not Back Swans either. Read the book “The Black Swan” by Nassim Taleb. By definition, you can’t predict a Black Swan. You can predict that there will be Black Swans that upend our world view. You can build shock absorbers and plan for the fact that things will not go according to plan. A more important question than “Am I right?” is “what are the consequences if I am wrong?”. Plan for being wrong. Plan for adjusting the way you see the world as you engage with it.