Benefit of ‘Getting Out of the Building’ … You Get Started
Last night I started teaching another mini of Lean Entrepreneurship at CMU. It looks like it’s going to be an amazing class. The students are a wonderful mix of different CMU graduate programs and from the first night’s interactions come with some really relevant prior work experiences.
However, about 4pm I started coming up with a bunch of excuses why it was going to be difficult such as “you have so much going on at Birchmere” or “one more night away from my kids each week.” Obviously, I’d committed and I really love to teach this class. So I wasn’t seriously considering not doing the class but upon reflection I realized it was really just me dealing with the challenges of starting something again.
As disciplined as I try to be, it’s hard to get started. Yet every professional accomplishment I’m proud of involved me creating this momentum. It seems like I’m not alone as I shared both these quotes this morning on my twitter account:
“amateurs sit and wait for inspiration, the rest of us get up and go to work” - Stephen King
“The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing” - Walt Disney
I think part of the brillance of the Lean Startup & Customer Discovery / Development techniques we is that they provide a process to get started - specifically the emphasis on actually creating things and testing them or ‘getting out of the building’. Don’t get me wrong the biggest benefit is that the voice of the market really is smarter than any product manager. But a secondary (yet powerful) benefit is that it forces you to get started.
