Start Something That Matters

by Blake Mycoskie

No matter how convenient it is for us to reach out to people remotely, sometimes the most important task is to show up in person.

Make a list of every group to which you have a connection and that could help get it out there. This list might include your social network online (e.g., Facebook friends, Twitter followers), an alumni organization, a weekend sports team, yoga class members, a church congregation, and so on. These are your communities, and they already have a vested interest (even if loosely) in what you are doing with your life.

Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover. —MARK TWAIN

Fear stays with us throughout our lives. When we’re unemployed, we fear that we’ll never get another job. When we do get a job, we fear being fired. When we invest our earnings, we fear losing our savings. And when we start our own company, throwing in our own savings and efforts and faith, we fear losing everything.

“People tend to think that they should start something only when they are totally and completely knowledgeable about the field they want to enter. That probably will never happen. No one goes into these ventures knowing everything.

If you spend all your time learning and studying to be ready, you’ll never stop learning and studying. And you’ll never start your venture.”

“Many people starting something new are intimidated by the question ‘Is this the best idea I have?’ Of course a good idea is a great start, but the success of most ventures actually lies in the execution phase, not in the idea. I’d take a decent idea and superb execution over a great idea with sub-par execution any day of the week.”

When you live your story, you don’t have to pretend you’re someone you’re not. You can just be yourself. It’s been said that there’s nothing more dangerous than someone who has nothing to lose—and it’s true in business too. When you are living your story, it means your actions and your mission are the same, which eliminates any room for shame or disappointment, the two emotions that underlie our greatest fears. That’s when you have nothing to lose.

I would also write down my fears and look at them. When fears stay stuck inside your head, your imagination can go wild, torturing you with all the various negative possibilities and outcomes. But when you write them down, you clarify exactly what you are afraid of, and soon the power they hold over you will fade.

My final fear killer is to seek as much advice as I can—from everyone. You can often get great advice from all kinds of people if you just ask. Yes, some people probably won’t talk to you, no matter how intelligently you approach them. But you’d be surprised how many are more than happy to help.

I’ve found that people like to give advice to those with whom they empathize or in whom they see a version of themselves.

‘Someday’ is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you.… If it’s important to you and you want to do it ‘eventually,’ just do it and correct course along the way.”

Being comfortable can hurt your creative entrepreneurial spirit. An early and unearned sense of security can be the worst thing that can happen to a business.

too much money, he says, is not only unnecessary, but also toxic. Maples points out the inverse relationship between the amount of money an entrepreneur spends at start-up and the business’s ultimate success.

Compete (www.compete.com) and Quantcast (www.quantcast.com) can tell you how many monthly visitors your competitors’ websites are getting and the search terms that are generating the most traffic for them.

SpyFu (www.spyfu.com) can help you find out competitors’ online advertising spending, plus keyword and ad-word details. If their strategies are working, it’s likely they’ll work for you too.

Doodle (www.doodle.com): This is a great tool for setting up meetings with multiple people who have busy schedules.

Focus on the critical few, not the trivial many.

as a leader, your job is to help others do their jobs better.

Start something! What if that idea you have in the back of your head is a really good one, one that might end up helping tens of thousands of people? You owe it to the world to act. Or maybe it will help only a few people: The same advice applies. If you don’t do it, you are missing out on something big, and so are the people who could have been helped.