Make Your Mark

by Jocelyn K. Glei

Thought, if not written down and shared with others, changes nothing. Does it matter? Your ideas, if not captured and executed, affect nobody. Are they relevant?

That’s why the best businesses aren’t profit-driven or even product-driven; they’re purpose-driven. They strive to solve real problems, meet pressing needs, and change the world in ways big and small. They make a commitment to constantly learning and iterating and evolving to become better at executing their missions. They focus on creating value, and let everything else follow.

To define your personal purpose, start with these questions: How will the world be better off thanks to you having been on this earth? What are your unique gifts and superpowers? Who have you been when you’ve been at your best? Who must you fearlessly become?

Restraint and discipline come to those who are clear about their purpose in life.

Frankly, life is simply too short to fritter away your time chasing things that don’t matter to you. Or to the world.”

The impact you have in the world also affirms your purpose. Impact justifies purpose. It fuels purpose. It empowers you to live your purpose more boldly every day.

In the early days of a new business, you make choices—conscious and unconscious—that will influence your culture far into the future. If you’re not careful, those choices can become patterns that limit your ability to thrive.

What’s different about these companies is that they are lean, mean, learning machines. They have an intense bias to action and a high tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and relentless product iteration.

Success means never settling for what worked in the past.

Do the hard work of uncovering your purpose and summarizing it succinctly. It brings into focus the things that matter most, and provides a roadmap for future actions.

Don’t focus on what you need, focus on what the world needs. Follow your enthusiasm, your intuition, and your customers.

View your business itself as a product that you are constantly iterating on, tinkering with, and evolving. There are no answers without questions.

you can either build something a large number of people want a small amount, or something a small number of people want a large amount. Choose the latter.

Here’s the paradox: even if you make two great items right out of the gates, just by having two you make it harder for the customer to know what job to hire you for.

For your customer, the product is ultimately his or her experience of it and nothing more. So when you are creating and evolving a product, your primary role is really managing the experience of those who will use it. Which means that, at the end of the day, a great product maker must have empathy for the user’s experience.

All too often, great products gain an edge through their simplicity in the beginning (which is usually a matter of expediency), only to become overly complex or bloated as they are evolved.

Dave Morin, co-founder and CEO of the mobile social network Path, likes to say that “the devil is in the default.” While you may have a lot of other things to offer, the “default experience”—the one that happens without any additional learning or customization from the user—will determine the success or failure of your product.

And when you’re innovating, sheer thinking just won’t work. What gets you there is fast iteration, and fast failing. And when you fail, you’ve done something great: you’ve learned something.

At some time, everybody is driven by fear. But we need to—as much as we can—take fear out of the game. One way to do this is to imagine that you are already successful. You’ve looked into the future, and you’ve succeeded. What would you enjoy doing today given that knowledge?

Don’t limit the shape of the solution too early in the product development process. Remove constraints, focus on the problem, and work from “first principles.”

Make reciprocity part of your business strategy. Strive to share some part of your expertise, content, or product with your community for free.

Don’t try to control the conversation about your brand. Focus instead on influencing the conversation your customers are having in a positive way by delivering killer service.

Customers notice the little things; no detail is too small to be an opportunity for delight.

One of the greatest drains on a company’s resources is a lack of clarity and direction. No matter how fast a runner you are, if you’re running in the wrong direction, you’ll never win the race.

Here’s the thing: Every idea that matters hits the market too soon. While you’re busy practicing and preparing, you’re also hiding from the market, keeping your worthy and world-changing idea from the rest of us.