Ted Lasso once said, “be curious not judgemental.” What does this mean? What can we learn from it? Lets try to answer it with a story.
The Story
About two years ago, my friend Marcel Benson (Barry) wanted to start a watch company.
A lot of people probably thought that was a dumb idea.
Watches? The world doesn’t need more watches!
But that’s not what Barry thought. He liked watches. He’d always been fascinated with them. He had a whole collection, even as a kid.
So that’s what he started working on. And when he worked, it worked.
Kickstarter Raise
He raised over $12,000 with his Kicktarter, bootstrapped production and bankrolled himself.
Benson Watch was born.
Now, whenever I see his posts online, with pictures of the products he’s shipping — and all the happy people who also believe the world needs more watches, I smile.
The motto of Benson watch is “Time Should Be Spent Doing What You Love.”
But to do what you love, you have to actually start.
Barry started.
What will be the reason why you don’t start something tomorrow?
Will it be because the price of gold is down?
Will it be because global warming is making it dreadfully hot this summer?
Will it be because your computer has a new virus that keeps making Google Chrome crash?
Oh, how inconvenient it is to get started!
Be Curious Not Judgemental
For the self-starters: what will be the reason you DO start something tomorrow?
Will it be because you woke up in the middle of the night with an idea that you just couldn’t shake?
Was it a song, painting or movie that reminded you of an idea you thought long-since forgotten, and are now acting on?
Will it be because you know that there’s no amount of emails you can send, reports you can give or meetings you can attend that will make you feel a fraction of the sheer pleasure you experience from just doing “your thing” — whatever that thing is?
I think you should start.
I think you should stop worrying about reasons why it won’t work and only focus on the reasons why it will.
If you have an idea, why not try it? I mean, seriously.
I saw an awesome post on Reddit the other day. The question was, “How can I earn lots of money?”
Some scrappy bootstrapper wrote a very detailed how-to about how he’d made really good money using drones to survey the land of different construction and industrial sites and provided pics/videos to the management for safety purposes.
I thought it was a super creative idea. It was well laid out.
Was it a perfect plan? No. Of course not. There were potential hiccups. It requires getting specific permits. It would involve getting past some gatekeepers.
But it’s not an impossible idea. Not by a long shot. And it’s more creative than starting another social media management company.
Or cutting lines.
The drone and permits would cost about $1,200 altogether. Other than that, there were literally no costs involved. And if it didn’t work, you still had a sweet drone that shoots in 4k HD and a pilot’s license.
That’s definitely not the worst outcome in the world.
I’m sure you can guess what happened next.
Everyone Lost Their Minds
EVERYBODY ON REDDIT LOST THEIR MINDS.
Everybody in the comment section ripped this guy to shreds. They could barely stop talking about how horrible the idea was, how obviously flawed his logic was, and how scammy guy was in general. Especially because he included [GASP] a link to his website in the post.
RIPPED TO SHREDS. And this was the Entrepreneur subreddit, where one would assume people to be more open-minded!
One troll summed it up best:
“Are people really this gullible? Oh yeah guys, I have an idea that makes me $500k a month. But I’ve been there and done that so here is everything you need to do, just go to my website. Maybe this guy did make 50k and maybe he didn’t. If in the unlikely event he did then he fluked it and knows the business is dead. If something sounds too good to be true then 99% of the time it is.”
Does this sound like the attitude of a “starter?”
Where’s the adventurous spirit, my friends?
It’s easy to get caught up in the thousands of little details that will make things harder for you. But getting caught up in those details stops you from seeing the bigger picture: pretty much anything IS possible these days.
The walls are down. The doors are open. You can tweet the President and he’ll hit you back.
You’re not always going to get everything you want.
But you can’t say that you didn’t have the opportunity. Not now. Not in the era of Facetime, automated cars and stem cells.
You just have to be curious not judgemental when starting.
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