Wednesday, November 23, 2011

Holding your hand to the fire

Several months ago, I wrote a post about the four stages of learning.  Implicit in the transition out of stage 1, the "enthusiastic beginner", is the fact that to really learn something, you need to try to do it, and inevitably, do it wrong.  

Given the wealth of fantastic content out there in the blogosphere, especially when it comes to starting a company, raising capital, building a product, etc., it can be tempting to try to read blogs and hope that they'll help you navigate potential road mines. But if you are brand new to any one of these domains, most of what you read won't really "catch" in your brain. Instead, I find the best time to learn something is after I just messed up on that thing.

So if you're starting something for the first time, and find yourself making rookie mistakes like building too many features into the first version of your product, or not having your "elevator pitch" ready when you pitch a VC, don't worry.  To really learn, you need to hold your hand to the fire.

As Rob May of Backupify once tweeted, "Everything I learned about doing a startup came from doing a startup... not reading blogs about it."